Sigrok – a portable, cross-platform, FOSS signal analysis software suite
sigrok.org
sigrok.org
I also found the style of the code quite antiquated, without any wish to change that. But that's my taste.
So, in the end, my work on that driver felt wasted.
You don't send a huge patch to a project as a first time contributor.
I am sure sigrok would benefit from your improvements, but sometimes the maintainer has a busy life outside the project so you need to adapt to their pace, at least in the beginning.
Although that’s a good guideline, it’s not true in absolute terms. Sometimes the contribution is a big patch!
I think a lot of people forget that changesets are sometimes not the most straightforward way to express ideas. They (including myself) also forget that while you are working with a change in front of you it's obvious but in one month it could be opaque. A maintainer is often giving you the perspective of you a month later who built on this system you changed.
That's fine - the driver would improve if the contributions are accepted, and they don't touch core code that will break other things. But instead totally non-functional drivers are left languishing because PRs aren't merged.
In the case of Sigrok the problem didn't seem so much the maintainers, but rather non-developers "triaging" PRs with unhelpful advice to split patches, when a lack of actual developers meant they'd never be looked at anyway. Otherwise a fork might have occurred rather than wasting everyone's time.
There are a lot of pending changes that I simply cannot review or verify easily since I don't have the hardware the driver is written for. Asking for help has never really been met with much enthusiasm, unfortunately.
Either way, I'll get to these as soon as I can and help is definitely welcome.
Having said that, you did eventually get a ton of comments, by a trusted and well-respected contributor (wsa), but I guess you'd already given up by then, so didn't respond.
How about this: make the changes requested, and I'll personally take on further review and/or approval. I'm the original author of the OLS driver, and of course I have the hardware, so that's as good an opportunity to get your code in as you'll get.
I found the OLS, especially with the Demon Core, a really neat piece of hardware.
Sometimes, when the changes are too big to make a decision by code review alone, we need to rely on user feedback. Unfortunately, this is always a challenge as there aren't a lot of users around who are willing to test changes.
I hope to improve the situation by allowing the CI/CD pipeline to provide binaries for PRs so users don't have to build from source.
Either way, your efforts aren't wasted and I appreciate anyone wanting to help out.
The next time I need my oscilloscope, I want to take a few moments to try out https://www.ngscopeclient.org/
start relatable: “my experience” add reinforcing detail: works well with fx2 hw add negative experience: bad for analog logic introduce habit trigger: next time use ngscopeclient for analog logic
If you have not already done do, I highly suggest installing timeshift[0] and the associated pacman hook[1]. Make sure to appropriately configure them and setup good timers. This will save you a lot of headaches, especially if you have an Nvidia GPU (Jensen please...)
edit: actually I think that's azonenberg's project. IIRC I discussed it with him once, and the reason was licensing, not technical.
The greatest issue I see is that this is a fairly niche field for open source software historically due to the difficulty of acquiring the actual logic analyzers for a personal or student lab at times. People in general see older projects as establish and will often guide their focus to their own greenfield interests.
There are now a growing number of people entering this area of development however and more projects are being founded every month as availability and support for good-quality, stable hardware is increasing!
This is an exciting time for open source analysis, and given the availability and maturity of older 24mhz logic analyzers, on-demand manufacturing and supporting protects (kicad) I expect this to continue.
Hopefully sigrok takes on some new contributors who can engender even greater cooperation from this extremely relevant and exciting project!
I tried on Linux & mac, but never could get it to run well. I'd be super curious to chat with someone who had a different experience on what you've been doing differently from me!
I love the idea of Sigrok, so would love to get it to work (well) for me
I later recommended that we buy a Saleae analyzer just in case the SF one was hiding a problem and I didn't find any substantive difference between the two.
I haven't used it in years, but I clicked back to the first devlist email I had, and it seems that was from 2010. Wow. It's really old and feels well established, a great success!
No idea how live it is as an open source project, I have to check out the current status.
However, one or more of you idiots keeps downvoting every single one of his comments, and they're all marked dead, and invisible.
Edit: I sent the email myself.
I don't think i've used sigrok (or the other product mentioned around here), but i do have one of those usb oscopes and now i want to check it [sigrok] out. Whenever i see a bunch of people bellyaching about free software i gotta try it out - it usually ends up a permanent part of my toolkit.
thanks for replying, and i hope the maintainer gets their comments undeaded.
The only downside is the stability issues (fast crash to desktop). Happens pretty much every time I use it. Still the best tool of its kind
The most consistently crashing behavior has been when trying to import or work with csv or vcd data (pure 0/1 data)
Super useful for running e.g. timing measurements and quick-and-dirty plotting. Or grepping through millions of signal transitions to pin down a nasty race condition.
Is this a funding problem?
Do we need to have the xz conversation again?
I really do love OSS but we need to figure out something where valuable projects aren't just hobbies or side projects (not even a side hustle). With all this time can we not improve on our model? To get funding where it's needed? This is also a friendly reminder than most big tech companies will donation match, so maybe send $5 to a few of your favorite projects. You're making big money now, you can buy a few beers for you friend (and put a few on the company's dime).
No.
Money would only help insofar as it would allow me to buy hardware I could test drivers with. However, I don't have the space for such equipment and even a simple scope costs so much that it would probably eat up a year of donations.
I appreciate your thoughtfulness, though. In the end, all I ask is for contributors to see things from the project's point of view and try to make things as easy as possible. I hope that more people will join our efforts once the project has more visible signs of life again.
> it's a general FOSS problem
But I do think this is in part related to the "staying around" issue. No one wants to do the boring stuff and it's easier to just give people a salary and throw that under their umbrella. Hard to justify this in volunteer work.
I do wish we would have a real conversation about this on HN and we could actually dig deep into it. But I think it is easy to think it is not a problem because things appear to be working smoothly, so cracks are easy to ignore and it is easy to not think about if we could be more efficient. I definitely don't know a solution to the problem but I'm sure given some time there's more than enough smart people around here that understand different aspects of the problem that it could be solved.
That said, I do personally appreciate your project, and have recently gotten into some hardware hacking (need to fix some devices...). And I hope you focus more on the encouragement in the thread over the criticism (even though some is valid, constraints matter).
On a completely different note, is there any plans for a full TUI? Or someone that is doing this?
What's a TUI here? sigrok-cli can do everything the backend libs do, or do you mean some more interactive text client?