G
GMorris
Hello, all,
First, sorry about posting to several groups, but I'm hoping to reach a
larger audience for this. Over the years, I have done a great deal of
developing with VB, VBA, and several other languages, but mostly VBA and
Office. One of my interests is logic and building digital circuits, so I
found Visio quite useful - well, to a degree anyway. Some time ago, I
searched high and low for a Visio solution with "live" circuits without much
luck so I started building one myself. Needless to say, this turned out to
be a bit more work than I anticipated, but now I have almost a full-fledged
app that still needs work, and is at a point that I need some outside input
to finish it up. The demand for this could be limited to education and
hobbyists, but if it gets good enough I might find more markets than that.
So far, I've been my only beta-tester, which isn't that bad, since I can
easily bugfix as they happen. Now, I want to locate some sincere parties to
test the app, and give criticism. I need to know what's good about it,
what's bad, what could be added, etc., and since I'm not a professional
circuit designer I can only guess after a certain point.
The best part about it is that after you build a circuit, it works. Right
now it's strictly logic gates (AND, OR, XOR) with a few pre-built flip-flops
and a couple of accesories. I even made a pulse input that can be changed to
emit more than one pulse and you can set the delay between pulses to watch
counters and such. I decided to use only the Visio Dynamic connector to
trigger the code that virtually connects two gates, that is, you can connect
them on the page with any 2D shape, but the Dynamic connector will get the
name of the output gate and put the formula in the correct cell of the input
shape. It is really nice, and I never would have believed it would be such a
task if I hadn't taken the time to do it. I have also made a routine to
create assemblies, masters that do what a selected group of gates and I/O
do. It is shaping up very nicely (no pun intended!) and I'm even impressed
with it now. I've created BCD adders, parallel binary adders, all kinds of
working components that can be wired together and that actually work.
If anyone is seriouly interested in this, drop me an email at
(e-mail address removed) and I'll discuss it further. I don't want to start
sending files to everybody who is just curious as that could get expensive
time-wise, but even if you just know someone else who is studying digital
electronics (or teaching it), or who might actually use this sort of
software, let them know about it. Oh, and just in case you are wondering,
the VBA project is locked and will remain locked, no exceptions so don't
even think about it. That's a lot of sweat in those lines of code! But I
will cut loose of some sample drawings that already work, and the custom
components that only work with my code and vice-versa. They will be
copyrighted as well since I am hoping to market this at some time. Thanks
for reading this far, and feel free to contact me if interested.
Gary W. Morris
(e-mail address removed)
First, sorry about posting to several groups, but I'm hoping to reach a
larger audience for this. Over the years, I have done a great deal of
developing with VB, VBA, and several other languages, but mostly VBA and
Office. One of my interests is logic and building digital circuits, so I
found Visio quite useful - well, to a degree anyway. Some time ago, I
searched high and low for a Visio solution with "live" circuits without much
luck so I started building one myself. Needless to say, this turned out to
be a bit more work than I anticipated, but now I have almost a full-fledged
app that still needs work, and is at a point that I need some outside input
to finish it up. The demand for this could be limited to education and
hobbyists, but if it gets good enough I might find more markets than that.
So far, I've been my only beta-tester, which isn't that bad, since I can
easily bugfix as they happen. Now, I want to locate some sincere parties to
test the app, and give criticism. I need to know what's good about it,
what's bad, what could be added, etc., and since I'm not a professional
circuit designer I can only guess after a certain point.
The best part about it is that after you build a circuit, it works. Right
now it's strictly logic gates (AND, OR, XOR) with a few pre-built flip-flops
and a couple of accesories. I even made a pulse input that can be changed to
emit more than one pulse and you can set the delay between pulses to watch
counters and such. I decided to use only the Visio Dynamic connector to
trigger the code that virtually connects two gates, that is, you can connect
them on the page with any 2D shape, but the Dynamic connector will get the
name of the output gate and put the formula in the correct cell of the input
shape. It is really nice, and I never would have believed it would be such a
task if I hadn't taken the time to do it. I have also made a routine to
create assemblies, masters that do what a selected group of gates and I/O
do. It is shaping up very nicely (no pun intended!) and I'm even impressed
with it now. I've created BCD adders, parallel binary adders, all kinds of
working components that can be wired together and that actually work.
If anyone is seriouly interested in this, drop me an email at
(e-mail address removed) and I'll discuss it further. I don't want to start
sending files to everybody who is just curious as that could get expensive
time-wise, but even if you just know someone else who is studying digital
electronics (or teaching it), or who might actually use this sort of
software, let them know about it. Oh, and just in case you are wondering,
the VBA project is locked and will remain locked, no exceptions so don't
even think about it. That's a lot of sweat in those lines of code! But I
will cut loose of some sample drawings that already work, and the custom
components that only work with my code and vice-versa. They will be
copyrighted as well since I am hoping to market this at some time. Thanks
for reading this far, and feel free to contact me if interested.
Gary W. Morris
(e-mail address removed)