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 )

Uninstall Rhapsody

Uninstalling is easy, when you know what to do…

[wpvideo 6icZXjQk]

Installing Rhapsody

This video tells you what options you have to install Rhapsody. It gives a proposal for the best way to do it.

[wpvideo icJnAjFR]

Configuring Rhapsody

And when installed, you have to know how to start the correct version. This video helps!

[wpvideo Bk3M0Y63]

So… that’s it for today

Have fun with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Uninstall Rhapsody

Uninstalling is easy, when you know what to do…

[wpvideo 6icZXjQk]

Installing Rhapsody

This video tells you what options you have to install Rhapsody. It gives a proposal for the best way to do it.

[wpvideo icJnAjFR]

Configuring Rhapsody

And when installed, you have to know how to start the correct version. This video helps!

[wpvideo Bk3M0Y63]

So… that’s it for today

Have fun with Rhapsody!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

This week I’m in Boston at a customer that is starting a new project. I’m helping setting it up, setting up the model and the rest of the development environment.

In the beginning of our Rhapsody days, we were always happy to tell people we were the experts in “Systems with limited resources”. Now. in fact, we still are, just because we have a lot of experience in that area. I don’t think many people know how to handle the specific requirements of modeling in small 8- or 16bit systems with kilobytes of memory and microseconds to respond.

But slowly we have been growing with our customers and we also do larger systems. This week I helped setting up a “larger” system. This a “normal” PC with Linux on it, accompanied by a couple of other boards that do small tasks (and have smaller controllers!)

The use of Linux as operating system immediately introduced one big question: how are we going to implement a framework?
Linux has processes and threads. ( See BLOG entry ) Are we using a distributed framework? Or the normal framework with Threads?
Both have advantages and disadvantages. Distributed Framework is more difficult to implement but just threads will influence the way you can use your system and will not give you all the advantages of memory protection.

We decided to use both ways with a “simple” framework and use IPC to communicate. So we would actually use multiple applications that communicate with the use of the OS.
The trouble with IPC is always that you need some base information to start the communication. You can use a “zeroconf” system like Apple’s bonjour where every client starts and assumes it is the “Master” until it finds another client that already is the master. Or you create a Master that is known by all clients.

We have chosen the last variant. A Master-broker is in the system, waiting and listening on a fixed IPC Channel. Clients report to that Channel with their name and the Master sets up the communication. The client then opens up for its local clients to publish/subscribe that it will communicate with the Master-broker that registers all clients in the complete network. C++ makes a lot of this easier.

It was real fun to set this up. Most work was spend on setting up the development environment and describing how to use it. We use GIT and Sharepoint to do that.
The compiler/IDE is Eclipse in Ubuntu Linux, we deploy code to a shared directory with Windows. IPC on Linux is done with named pipes.

We spend some tie setting up the Rhapsody model so that the package structure was logical and ready for use by multiple people. The model will contain a lot of components that must be built separately. Luckily you can tell Rhapsody to “build all” (which will generate and deploy all in our case) Eclipse can also build a complete project with multiple executables. We also built some test tools to test the Broker setup.

This is what many people underestimate when starting to use MBSE. The UML Tool will not do that for you. It is a a UML Tool, UML is a language, not a process nor a development environment. It is very important to spend time setting that up and documenting it. Use a central documentation tool like Confluence, Sharepoint or MediaWiki, your success depends on it!

So… just work in Boston? Nope… in my 3rd Boston visit I finally had the time to visit “Cheers”, the bar of one of my favorite TV series.
I’ll end this one with a quote from Norm:

“Can I pour you a beer, Mr. Peterson?”
“A little early isn’t it, Woody?”
“For a beer?” “No, for stupid questions.”

“Cheers!” and Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Introduction

This week I’m in Boston at a customer that is starting a new project. I’m helping setting it up, setting up the model and the rest of the development environment.

In the beginning of our Rhapsody days, we were always happy to tell people we were the experts in “Systems with limited resources”. Now. in fact, we still are, just because we have a lot of experience in that area. I don’t think many people know how to handle the specific requirements of modeling in small 8- or 16bit systems with kilobytes of memory and microseconds to respond.

But slowly we have been growing with our customers and we also do larger systems. This week I helped setting up a “larger” system. This a “normal” PC with Linux on it, accompanied by a couple of other boards that do small tasks (and have smaller controllers!)

The use of Linux as operating system immediately introduced one big question: how are we going to implement a framework?
Linux has processes and threads. ( See BLOG entry ) Are we using a distributed framework? Or the normal framework with Threads?
Both have advantages and disadvantages. Distributed Framework is more difficult to implement but just threads will influence the way you can use your system and will not give you all the advantages of memory protection.

We decided to use both ways with a “simple” framework and use IPC to communicate. So we would actually use multiple applications that communicate with the use of the OS.
The trouble with IPC is always that you need some base information to start the communication. You can use a “zeroconf” system like Apple’s bonjour where every client starts and assumes it is the “Master” until it finds another client that already is the master. Or you create a Master that is known by all clients.

We have chosen the last variant. A Master-broker is in the system, waiting and listening on a fixed IPC Channel. Clients report to that Channel with their name and the Master sets up the communication. The client then opens up for its local clients to publish/subscribe that it will communicate with the Master-broker that registers all clients in the complete network. C++ makes a lot of this easier.

It was real fun to set this up. Most work was spend on setting up the development environment and describing how to use it. We use GIT and Sharepoint to do that.
The compiler/IDE is Eclipse in Ubuntu Linux, we deploy code to a shared directory with Windows. IPC on Linux is done with named pipes.

We spend some tie setting up the Rhapsody model so that the package structure was logical and ready for use by multiple people. The model will contain a lot of components that must be built separately. Luckily you can tell Rhapsody to “build all” (which will generate and deploy all in our case) Eclipse can also build a complete project with multiple executables. We also built some test tools to test the Broker setup.

This is what many people underestimate when starting to use MBSE. The UML Tool will not do that for you. It is a a UML Tool, UML is a language, not a process nor a development environment. It is very important to spend time setting that up and documenting it. Use a central documentation tool like Confluence, Sharepoint or MediaWiki, your success depends on it!

So… just work in Boston? Nope… in my 3rd Boston visit I finally had the time to visit “Cheers”, the bar of one of my favorite TV series.
I’ll end this one with a quote from Norm:

“Can I pour you a beer, Mr. Peterson?”
“A little early isn’t it, Woody?”
“For a beer?” “No, for stupid questions.”

“Cheers!” and Happy modeling with Rhapsody

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

Vacation!

Hi! And sorry for the low BLOG frequency. It’s vacation time. Not that I am on vacation, that would actually mean I have more time to write… No, I am busy at the moment, other are on vacation which leads to more work and I have a lot to do  privately: I’m building a new house.
That is… I have other people build me a house… As I always say: I have two right hands but unfortunately I am left-handed… (BTW: Today August 13 is international left-hander day!!)
So I do not build but that does not mean my work is done… there is a lot to do besides physically building.
So we did not planned a holiday because the house should have been finished around this time….
“Should have been”?? Yep. It’s not.

When software projects go rogue and take longer than planned, one of the things people (non-involved people…) say is: “These software projects… always late… they should learn how to plan just like the people who build houses.”
Well…. That is just sooo not true.. building projects also go rogue. Mine does but others do as well.
Builders plan but the same way software people plan. So plenty of space for mistakes and “unknown”
In my case the architect designed my house with a CAD tool. Not a very advanced one, I am still waiting on a 3D view…, but that is how he did it. The guy is an artist and he draws beautiful houses. We were very enthusiastic about it and we even got the permission to build it from our community (Yes that is needed in the Netherlands)

There were a lot of prerequisites that we had to comply with, it had to fit in a certain part of our (own!!!) ground and it had to have a straw roof (To make it look like the other farms in the neighbourhood)
I did not want that, I wanted Tesla Tiles that create power, but hey…
So the architect draw the straw roof. The drawings of the architect then have to be enhanced by a constructor that knows how you build a house. Then the builder starts organising sub contractors to deliver parts.
It turned out when he ordered the roof that the angle was not steep enough. So the roofer would do it but with our guarantee.
So back to the drawing board and half a year delay (New permit, new calculations…)
So don’t tell me building houses goes better than building software…

So I asked myself: Would modelling have helped here?
I think so. The fact that a straw roof needs an angle of more than 45º is basic knowledge that should have been a design rule in the CAD program.
Moreover, I have not seen anybody work with a tool like Doors or Polarion to fix the house requirements. It is more advanced than the last time I built a house (1986) but it is with Mail, WhatsApp and Word that the house is built.

Back to Rhapsody

Vacation time is a good time to work on improving your Rhapsody models!
Sometimes customers ask me to do a review on a Rhapsody model. What do I do in a review?
It depends of course but for totally new models I do a couple of steps which I want to share with you:

1. Check how old the model is. You cannot see it all but you can ask (..) and check if the model has CGCompatibilityPreX.Y Settings. They tell you the conversion already performed on the model (And the fact that the creators did not know what to do with it)
2. Do a Check Model ( “Tools”, “Check Model”, “<name>” ) This should give you a lot of information about the model. Most common warnings are: “Default Names” and “Empty Description” but there are many more.
   The more warnings, the less precise the model is built
3. Use Metrics to determine the number of elements in the model. Check for requirements, sequence diagrams and classes. There should be a fair number of requirements and a lot of sequence diagrams. unfortunately IBM stopped using the Metrics in 8.2. There is a more complicated system to still do it.
4. Use the built-in document creator ( “Tools” “Report on model”, then select only “Include Overridden Properties” ) to look at the overridden properties. This should be limited to profiles.
5. Do a general check.
   1. How do the names look? Consistent?
   2. How many packages compared to classes?
   3. Are there requirements used?
   4. Are there any Sequence Diagrams?
   5. Little number of properties is OK but not much
   6. What is the number of elements on diagrams. Yes that can be more than the “normal” 7+-2 but they should be understandable
   7. Are comments used?
   8. How is the diagram navigation?
   9. How many level of state-chart are there? One level or at most one sub-state-chart is OK. Everything else must be documented and proved necessary.
   10. Are model elements described in comment?

This is something that you can check yourself…. Do it sometimes.

Happy Modeling with Rhapsody

Greetings from Motown!

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)

License to thrill

The number 7 is a famous number, not in the least by James Bond who was, of course, “007”. He had a “License to Kill”. Our V7 has a “License to Thrill”.
That is what we hope it will do to you! OK, It took a us while, admitted, but the first release of our V7 RXF for ‘C++’ is now on our Willert Download Portal.
We have worked hard for it, had many Beta Releases and lots of changes to make the best RXF yet. A big thanks to everybody who worked on it but a special “Thank You” to Johannes who has really done a lot for this release!

What is changed?

• Completely made with Rhapsody. So the RXF is a model, with everything a model needs to be a good model, Requirements, traceability, Sequence Diagrams, explanations etc.
• Smaller and faster. (YES! although modelled and generated, the code is smaller and faster!)
• All adaptations integrated in one version. You select RTOS, compiler, CPU etc via tags.
• New Deployer, this one remembers a lot more of your stuff. (Is not completely finished yet but I’ll give the new features)
  • Creates direct links to the Rhapsody code in your IDE so round-tripping just works!
  • Able to create you own template models that you can select, they are then copied
  • stores its settings in the project
• Latest Target Debugger
  • faster, will not degrade performance when many events are processed
  • new design, improved stability and usage
  • break-point editor
  • editor for event injection
  • export to Rhapsody
• Easier to configure Memory Management

For the time being only in ‘C++’, ‘C’ will take a while. But with a decent compiler we recommend ‘C++’ anyway. Bob Dylan already sang it a long time ago: “The times they are changing”. And that is what happens. From ‘C’ only in 32Bit on 8 and 16Bit Targets to ‘C++’ on 64Bit on 16- and 32Bit Targets.

That was it for now. It’s hot here… almost too hot to work. Luckily we are getting used to it.

Have fun with Rhapsody!

What is the difference?

Rhapsody Developer is the “full” version of Rhapsody, EUSIII (Embedded UML Studio III) is the Willert version. The only difference is that EUSIII does not have Animation, all other features are there. Also EUSIII has the Willert RXF as additional Framework.

No Animation? Is that bad?

Not really. Animation will only work with Windows on a PC as target environment (Or Linux or another really powerful platform) otherwise it is not possible/practical to use it. EUSIII has an alternative built-in solution called “Embedded UML target Debugger” that does the same but without using additional resources.

RXF?

Yep. The Real-time eXecution Framework. The Willert Framework that allows you to generate Rhapsody code on even the smallest of targets without real-time violations or large use of resources. Comes with a built-in single-threaded RTOS or adapters for other RTOSes. Also included is the UML target Debugger that can write Sequence Diagrams and Timing Diagrams even from a small target environment.

Re-install?

Nope. Not necessary. You can keep using your existing installation. Since EUSIII is based on the Architect for Software you have to start that version.

• Starting Rhapsody via a desktop icon. (Or via the start menu) Then you can open the properties of the shortcut and go to the tab “Shortcut” (Names are different in other languages) There you can add “-architect” to the “target” field. If it already says “-dev_ed” you have to remove that. You can add the -lang=C or -lang=C++ to start the correct language by default.
• Starting Rhapsody by double-klick a Rhapsody Model. Now you have to look for the Rhapsody.ini file. This should be in the directory next to where your “Share” directory is. In that file there are 2 commands:

  DefaultEdition=Architect
  DefaultLanguage=c++

  You should change them that they say “Architect” and the correct language.

Install RXF

Not only does EUSIII come with the RXF, you really need it. Without an RXF the code generation will not work. So you must install one. It is not important which one but of course you should install one that you want to use. Installation is easy, just start the setup, answer the questions, check if there are no errors (When an error is given during installation it will NOT workl!!!)
When you have purchased EUSIII (Or just an RXF) you have access to the Willert Download Portal where you can download your RXF adapters for the Language (C or C++) the Compiler (Keil, IAR, GreenHills, Visual Studio and many more) and the RTOS (CMSIS, FreeRTOS, OORTX, µCOS, Linux and many more) that you want to use.

License

You either have received a dongle (with a license file) or just a license file (Floating License) You just install that as usual with Rhapsody,

So that’s it. Happy Modeling with Embedded UML Studio III

Walter van der Heiden (wvdheiden@willert.de)