Yes, I know, it is originally called Groundhog Day and not GroundHague Day.
And it is officially the 2nd of February and not October 31, I know.
But I had the feeling I was reliving the same day over and over again in The Hague and that reminded of one of my favorite movies.

A couple of years ago I had something similar when I needed a Visa for India. On the first Day I went there it turned out I had not enough information. So I had to return the next day (with the same information) and then after a few hours wait I got my badly needed Visa. Just in Time, the next day was my flight…

This time I needed a China Visa. At the beginning of this year I also needed an India Visa but India had now finally reached the 21st century and switched to eVisa. So the internet and a credit card payment sufficed.

Not so for China. I could send in all information by mail but that would mean I would have to send my passport as well. That would mean I would be without passport for more than 2 weeks. That is not an option with my normal travel schedule. I found out, however, that I can have a second passport just for this reason. Good for next time.

Since I have to be there not only for the 11th AUTOSAR Open Conference but also for the MESCONF, my German colleagues offered to take care of the Visa. But that turned out to be impossible. I am still Dutch and I still live I the Netherlands.

So I used the Public Holiday in Germany to go to the China Visa Office in The Hague. By train, I am not going to drive in my country, takes ages, no parking place and a lot of stress.
The Visa Office was not, as I assumed, in the Chinese Embassy, but there is a (commercial!) office that controls the visa process. The real visa is, of course, issued by the embassy, but the process around it is handled by a third party.

It went a lot quicker than the India one, a short 5 minute wait and it was my turn. So confidence increased. Unfortunately the papers I brought were not sufficient. For Germany they were but not for the Netherlands. They did not accept any document that was not in either Chinese or English (so not the German documents I had) and they needed more documentation from China.
Now another tiny problem was that China was also already closed (They are 7 hours ahead of us) so no chance to getting the needed documents
(I needed an official document from the Commerce Chamber of China that the company I was visiting really existed….) …
So…return the next day, Phil…

The next day I had all info covered. I woke up at 4 to have more time with China, I had already mailed the list I needed the night before, received everything I needed, printed it all together with a new application form and I now hoped it was OK. So back to The Hague with the train.
And… it was, they accepted the application and I received a paper that I needed to collect my passport 6 days later…. Now that was not an option (I had to fly 2 days later)
Luckily they had an emergency procedure. But China does not work fast, they need a full day (And that is the urgent where they left you bleed for, financially that is, €200 ,-)
So… return the next day, Phil…

So the next day I went to The Hague again, now it took only 10 minutes but than I had my passport back with a fresh China Visa. The groundhog did not see his shadow and the winter was over… back home and the time can continue.

Is there any Rhapsody news? Yes there is!!! We have a new promotion movie. Called “single source of Truth”, it is very very nice.

Managing complexity, managing resources, achieving goals: Successful projects in embedded systems / software engineering need powerful, coordinated procedures, tools and competencies. The single source of truth principle is an important element in the context of model-driven engineering.

You can find it on:

Willert Website, YouTube, Vimeo

So… that’s it. Blogging in China is not easy. The Chinese government does not like google, WhatsApp, YouTube and a lot of other sites where we normally work with. So don’t be mad if you don’t see much of me next weeks.

Happy Modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

I’ve been to Nantes a couple of times. I really like it there. It is a great city, quite large but with a very nice old town. This time I was not alone, the whole company joined me.

We are closely cooperating with Sodius. They are located mainly in Nantes and we wanted to give all colleagues a chance to learn to know each other.

So all the German and US colleagues flew over to have a weekend of getting to know each other better.

The French really made an effort to show the best of their city, country and themselves, it was brilliant!

We had a party on a boat on the river, we were having dinner in the “Machines”, we played “live” monopoly in the city, we visited a vineyard and we had some presentations so that we now now a lot more of each other.

We have a lot to do to integrate both companies but we are all very enthusiastic about the opportunities.

I added some pictures of Nantes and the fantastic weekend we had.

What is the impact of the cooperation for Rhapsody?

We hope a lot and not a lot… what I mean is that I hope that the effects will be positive for our customers. We are now selling our Rhapsody version in France and in the USA as well, that is good, the more customers the better the product gets.

Together with Sodius we own a large part of the Rhapsody eco-system. We now do the code generator, the framework, the XMI and AUTOSAR import and export and some more. It is good to have that in one company, that improves the interfaces for the extensions. Our very close cooperation and vicinity to and with BTC is also an advantage.

Furthermore we now have an extremely interesting product that we will be developing further together, SEcollab. This is a tool that can read data from various other tools like Rhapsody, Doors, EA, MagicDraw, Simulink, MS Office and many more sources, of course it can handle OSLC. It then presents this data in a web browser, readable for everybody (who has the access rights of-course) It can then help you link the information and support in doing reviews.

Other use-cases are the ability to do global configuration (not yet fully implemented) It can even act as a viewer for the data from all sources ( so also Rhapsody! I don’t know how many people have asked me for that in the passed years…)

I will write more about SEcollab in one of the next BLOG entries.

For now, happy modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Salut!

Just back from Munich I was one day at home to switch my suitcase and get prepared for the next trip. This time a bit longer and further away but the start was in Paris.

I had to go to France anyway so I combined the visit with a visit to the Louvre. No not the museum, IBM organized the IBM Think! Conference there.

This was a cool conference, the only problem is that everybody spoke French and all the presentations (but one) were in French.

My French is not as sophisticatedly my German and English, unfortunately… but I managed. There were 2 presentations with fast and unclear speaking people where I really struggled to understand what they were telling, but most was understandable.

The one presentation that was in English was also the coolest (by far…) :

INFRASTRUCTURES ET PERFORMANCES
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing – Brian Jones, Head of Software Development

I think that at least 2/3 of the audience left the room, because it was in English…. Their bad because Brian had a cool story to tell about using big data in formula 1 to achieve an advantage on the competition. Very very interesting, thanks Brian!

At night there was time left to visit the Mondial, the Paris Auto Salon. A nice view on the new cars of today and new technology, very cool!

AUTOSAR

This was a nice “bridge” to the subject of today. The use of Rhapsody in an Automotive environment. We at Sodius and Willert are working very hard at creating solutions that will support automotive engineers to do their complex jobs as good and right as possible.

That is not easy, many OEMs and TIERx companies have very well defined processes and always a high degree of time pressure that makes it difficult for them to change anything in their daily work.

As Henry Ford already said: If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said: “A faster horse”. So you can ask your customer (and you should surely do that!) but you have to define your won way at least partly and then convince customers that your way is the better way.

Since using Rhapsody with Code Generation will already change a lot in the daily routine of everybody but certainly in that of the automotive engineer who already has defined run-time systems (that mostly use periodic tasks) The Rhapsody generated code assumes a preemptive OS that allows you to send and receive events and react to them if they appear, and sleep when there is nothing to do. This is a fundamentally different approach then the MatLab approach that even uses “polled” state machines.

This kind of programming is also much closer to the human way of thinking. Many people consider a polling, or synchronous, system to be more deterministic than an asynchronous system. It is not, asynchronous systems are much more scalable and run without collision much longer than synchronous systems. They also fit better in Object Oriented Designs.

Many Automotive systems are only doable when using synchronous systems. All Control Loops work way better and simpler when you do them in Simulink. But there are lots of systems that are asynchronous. Think about everything that is under direct user control, indicator, power windows, HVAC control panel etc. There is lots of asynchronous stuff in a car.

The more complex systems in cars use both synchronous and asynchronous components. The easiest and nearest way to solve them is by using MatLab. Now that tool really helps you to do the synchronous stuff and it also can do asynchronous stuff with no real penalty. So that prevents people from using UML for creating code in an automotive environment.

Now MatLab and its friends will not really help you to gain understanding and reducing of the complexity in new systems. UML/SysML will, they allow you to setup an understandable architecture. But the real benefit will come from using it to program the asynchronous parts of the application and use the code generation.

The funny thing is that most people do not want the code that is generated from a UML tool like Rhapsody but have no objection against code from a MatLab Simulink model.
It took me a while to figure out why but I think I understand that now. Simulink, used by a Systems Engineer generates just a bit of code that is the exact representation of the algorithm. Writing the code for that would be difficult, the formulas are mathematical things that everybody hates to remember and understand. To generate the code actually relieves you from a lot of extra knowledge.
Generating code from UML is not that easy, you need a lot of extra knowledge to apply that. So people do generally not like to use it.

Another big difference with MatLab is that Simulink Code is mostly used in continuous algorithms, the code is incomprehensible but the diagram is easy to understand. UML (and certainly Rhapsody) excel in discrete algorithms. There the diagrams are also relatively light to understand, as is the code, but the code needs some extra stuff around it to work. That is where people stop using it, it is just not straight forward.

So this is the big dilemma of the Sodius Willert developers, but I think we have some pretty good solutions to use mixed UML/Simulink/AUTOSAR environments. We have a very minimal framework that is easily to us inside an SWC, per ECU we only need one Framework, it can handle multiple instances. You can also import and export ARXML to be converted in stereotyped UML/SysML elements. We will present some solutions on several congresses in the next months.

We have experience in using UML in AUTOSAR environments, we have ASPICE experts on board, certainly in environments where certification is an issue (ASIL C or D) we have expertise and matching tools. And we can train you in using them!

SECollab

A nice opportunity to introduce the Sodius/Willert Tool SECollab (Systems Engineering Collaboration). This helps System Engineers to control all data that they use in their development process, they can make links to achieve traceability, use it for reviews (You don’t even need a license for the original tool to do that!) and derive documents for certification purposes.

SECollab is a server based solution, clients use Web Access, so no tiresome installation issues, just login on the website and access all information available (to you, of cours!)

Take a look at it, if you like it, contact me for a demo!

Happy modeling with Rhapsody (and SECollab!)

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Salut!

Just back from Munich I was one day at home to switch my suitcase and get prepared for the next trip. This time a bit longer and further away but the start was in Paris.

I had to go to France anyway so I combined the visit with a visit to the Louvre. No not the museum, IBM organized the IBM Think! Conference there.

This was a cool conference, the only problem is that everybody spoke French and all the presentations (but one) were in French.

My French is not as sophisticatedly my German and English, unfortunately… but I managed. There were 2 presentations with fast and unclear speaking people where I really struggled to understand what they were telling, but most was understandable.

The one presentation that was in English was also the coolest (by far…) :

INFRASTRUCTURES ET PERFORMANCES
Aston Martin Red Bull Racing – Brian Jones, Head of Software Development

I think that at least 2/3 of the audience left the room, because it was in English…. Their bad because Brian had a cool story to tell about using big data in formula 1 to achieve an advantage on the competition. Very very interesting, thanks Brian!

At night there was time left to visit the Mondial, the Paris Auto Salon. A nice view on the new cars of today and new technology, very cool!

AUTOSAR

This was a nice “bridge” to the subject of today. The use of Rhapsody in an Automotive environment. We at Sodius and Willert are working very hard at creating solutions that will support automotive engineers to do their complex jobs as good and right as possible.

That is not easy, many OEMs and TIERx companies have very well defined processes and always a high degree of time pressure that makes it difficult for them to change anything in their daily work.

As Henry Ford already said: If I had asked my customers what they wanted they would have said: “A faster horse”. So you can ask your customer (and you should surely do that!) but you have to define your won way at least partly and then convince customers that your way is the better way.

Since using Rhapsody with Code Generation will already change a lot in the daily routine of everybody but certainly in that of the automotive engineer who already has defined run-time systems (that mostly use periodic tasks) The Rhapsody generated code assumes a preemptive OS that allows you to send and receive events and react to them if they appear, and sleep when there is nothing to do. This is a fundamentally different approach then the MatLab approach that even uses “polled” state machines.

This kind of programming is also much closer to the human way of thinking. Many people consider a polling, or synchronous, system to be more deterministic than an asynchronous system. It is not, asynchronous systems are much more scalable and run without collision much longer than synchronous systems. They also fit better in Object Oriented Designs.

Many Automotive systems are only doable when using synchronous systems. All Control Loops work way better and simpler when you do them in Simulink. But there are lots of systems that are asynchronous. Think about everything that is under direct user control, indicator, power windows, HVAC control panel etc. There is lots of asynchronous stuff in a car.

The more complex systems in cars use both synchronous and asynchronous components. The easiest and nearest way to solve them is by using MatLab. Now that tool really helps you to do the synchronous stuff and it also can do asynchronous stuff with no real penalty. So that prevents people from using UML for creating code in an automotive environment.

Now MatLab and its friends will not really help you to gain understanding and reducing of the complexity in new systems. UML/SysML will, they allow you to setup an understandable architecture. But the real benefit will come from using it to program the asynchronous parts of the application and use the code generation.

The funny thing is that most people do not want the code that is generated from a UML tool like Rhapsody but have no objection against code from a MatLab Simulink model.
It took me a while to figure out why but I think I understand that now. Simulink, used by a Systems Engineer generates just a bit of code that is the exact representation of the algorithm. Writing the code for that would be difficult, the formulas are mathematical things that everybody hates to remember and understand. To generate the code actually relieves you from a lot of extra knowledge.
Generating code from UML is not that easy, you need a lot of extra knowledge to apply that. So people do generally not like to use it.

Another big difference with MatLab is that Simulink Code is mostly used in continuous algorithms, the code is incomprehensible but the diagram is easy to understand. UML (and certainly Rhapsody) excel in discrete algorithms. There the diagrams are also relatively light to understand, as is the code, but the code needs some extra stuff around it to work. That is where people stop using it, it is just not straight forward.

So this is the big dilemma of the Sodius Willert developers, but I think we have some pretty good solutions to use mixed UML/Simulink/AUTOSAR environments. We have a very minimal framework that is easily to us inside an SWC, per ECU we only need one Framework, it can handle multiple instances. You can also import and export ARXML to be converted in stereotyped UML/SysML elements. We will present some solutions on several congresses in the next months.

We have experience in using UML in AUTOSAR environments, we have ASPICE experts on board, certainly in environments where certification is an issue (ASIL C or D) we have expertise and matching tools. And we can train you in using them!

SECollab

A nice opportunity to introduce the Sodius/Willert Tool SECollab (Systems Engineering Collaboration). This helps System Engineers to control all data that they use in their development process, they can make links to achieve traceability, use it for reviews (You don’t even need a license for the original tool to do that!) and derive documents for certification purposes.

SECollab is a server based solution, clients use Web Access, so no tiresome installation issues, just login on the website and access all information available (to you, of cours!)

Take a look at it, if you like it, contact me for a demo!

Happy modeling with Rhapsody (and SECollab!)

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

So. Sorry for the long break, it has been busy. Traveling soups up energy, the BLOG is the first to suffer.
I was in Munich during Oktoberfest, again like last year. I am not a big fan of large parties with hundreds of thousands of people. I like beer but I enjoy it more when it is quite.
But I was invited by IBM and there were enough people I know so I went there. First speak with IBM about their products and then Friday night on the way to the “Schützenzelt” to drink some beers.
For the people who are not familiar with the Oktoberfest, it is an ancient tradition in Munich where people celebrate the harvest of the hop, which is used to make beer….
It is not in October, at least not completely, it starts in September.

It has become world famous and now there are many visitors from around the world.

So. At IBM discussing their products… Yes but the selling of their products… not the technical details, will do that at another congress, later this year.
This was held in the beautiful IoT Tower, on the 21st floor wit ha stunning view over Munich.

Back to Rhapsody

The Willert Support Department had some interesting cases last weeks, unfortunately not much to write about, there was a very hard to trace installation bug that did apparently influence only 1% of the people, difficult to track but IBM has found it and it is solved.
There is an iFix3 for the latest Rhapsody 8.3.1, see the download portal for the Release Notes.

The RXF

The RXF V7 is also becoming more and more updates. The actual version is V7.03, it now includes CMSIS1&2, OO-RTX, FreeRTOS, embOS, Windows, Linux, COO-RTX. In planning are QNX and Cygwin.
Examples are available for the Keil LPC1700 Board but also for the Infineon XMC4500relaxKit
The RXF-Cert is under construction for C++, so there is a lot going on in the Willert Lab!

So. Short but powerfull!

Have fun modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

So. Sorry for the long break, it has been busy. Traveling soups up energy, the BLOG is the first to suffer.
I was in Munich during Oktoberfest, again like last year. I am not a big fan of large parties with hundreds of thousands of people. I like beer but I enjoy it more when it is quite.
But I was invited by IBM and there were enough people I know so I went there. First speak with IBM about their products and then Friday night on the way to the “Schützenzelt” to drink some beers.
For the people who are not familiar with the Oktoberfest, it is an ancient tradition in Munich where people celebrate the harvest of the hop, which is used to make beer….
It is not in October, at least not completely, it starts in September.

It has become world famous and now there are many visitors from around the world.

So. At IBM discussing their products… Yes but the selling of their products… not the technical details, will do that at another congress, later this year.
This was held in the beautiful IoT Tower, on the 21st floor wit ha stunning view over Munich.

Back to Rhapsody

The Willert Support Department had some interesting cases last weeks, unfortunately not much to write about, there was a very hard to trace installation bug that did apparently influence only 1% of the people, difficult to track but IBM has found it and it is solved.
There is an iFix3 for the latest Rhapsody 8.3.1, see the download portal for the Release Notes.

The RXF

The RXF V7 is also becoming more and more updates. The actual version is V7.03, it now includes CMSIS1&2, OO-RTX, FreeRTOS, embOS, Windows, Linux, COO-RTX. In planning are QNX and Cygwin.
Examples are available for the Keil LPC1700 Board but also for the Infineon XMC4500relaxKit
The RXF-Cert is under construction for C++, so there is a lot going on in the Willert Lab!

So. Short but powerfull!

Have fun modeling with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

On the Road again

This week started with a flight to Switzerland. On Saturday night to be precise, my plane left Sunday morning at 7 from Schiphol, I cannot make that in time. So I slept in a hotel near the airport.

It turned out to be a “sporty” day, the hotel Shuttle brought me to Terminal 3 while I had to be in terminal 1…. also the first shuttle left the hotel at 6, drive took 15 minutes, all quite “sporty” to be in time.

But I made it with some running and I still had time to buy a present for my hosts.

Switzerland is a beautiful country, the flight brought me to Geneva, first time I’ve been there. From there the train took me to Neuchâtel, a really beautiful city next to the lake. The problem for us “other Europeans” is that Switzerland is expensive. Really expensive. The simplest things costs about 3 times what they cost in Germany. I always joke that when you want to have dinner you first have to raise your mortgage.
a bit exaggerated but with a slight truth in there.

But, as already said, the country is beautiful so I decided to enjoy it and not mind the costs.

Unfortunately it was not just fun and vacation… i had to work as well. But it was quite successful, that helps!

This weeks Rhapsody problem was mostly trouble with license keys. Mostly when everything works, it will continue to work. But before it works… and when it stops working…
After installing Rhapsody you should install the license. There are multiple ways to have a license, Authorised User or Floating )or Tokens), File or Dongle, EUSIII, Developer, Designer or Architect.

Authorised or Floating

A floating license is installed on a server. It can be used by multiple people though not at the same time. The license file will have a line that points to the server.

An authorised license can only be used by one person. You can, of course, change this person when a project ends or somebody quits but not multiple times a day.

You can have a dongle license but then you still have a license file, one with the dongle ID in there.

You should keep a document (Excel Sheet) with the names of the persons that use certain licenses. (In fact you have to according to the license agreement)

If you want to use Rhapsody in a continuous build environment you have to have a floating license.

The Rhapsody version is determined in the license file (and you have to start the right version of course! I have written a lot about starting the right version, try: (Un-)Installing and Configuring Rhapsody or Installing Rhapsody

The license file must be in a place where Rhapsody looks for it. this is determined by an Environment Variable: TELELOGIC_LICENSE_FILE. This points to the path where the license lives. (Only the path if the license file is called license.lic, otherwise the complete path.

To make things a bit more complicated, flex-lm also looks in the registry where it stores all previous paths where it found a license.
There is a neat program that you can use to check if the license is found and if it is correct, it is called lmtools. use that to check if your flex-lm is OK.

The pictures

That was it! Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden ( wvdheiden@willert.de )