0.42
Released April 16., 2008Workbench
SeqZap 0.42 introduces the concept of a workbench. A workbench
is collection of instantiated tools, that can be used both in
scripts and during development and script writing by the way of panels.
Panels
SeqZap 0.42 introduces the concept of a panel, a panel is a way for tools to allow viewing and editing of values in the specific application/target.
We expect the number of panels available in SeqZap to expand greatly in the coming future, especially since it is possible for third-party developers to write new panels themselves.
One of the built-in tools shipped with SeqZap which supports panels is the Modbus tool, in the screenshot on the right you can see two of these panels, a panel for reading a single value - and a panel for reading a list of values from a modbus slave device.
Capture/Replay
Another new adition to the range of features that a tool can support is the concept of a capturing tool, a tool which can capture the actions the user performs on the panel, and transform them to steps in a SeqZap procedure.
This allows the user to tweak the values for a particular tool call and then press "capture" when the desired values have been obtained.
So far no tools support capturing yet, but we are confident that this will change in the next release.
Modbus
Release 0.42 also sees the advent of a new and general tool
for interfacing with Modbus capable devices, both directly in
SeqZap and using a custom developed more device-specific tool
which uses the Modbus to talk to the device.
Stream
Apart from a general way to talk to Modbus devices, release 0.42 also introduces a general way to talk to data streams/sinks, this means that by building a tool which uses the Stream tool for communication it will automatically support using both serial lines, files and others as a communication medium.
In the future we plan to support even more stream types like a TCP/IP carried data stream.
The Modbus tool also uses the Stream tool, so it will automatically start supporting TCP/IP communication as soon as the Stream tool does.