About visualapplets.py
The Basler AG company provides a TCL scripting engine to automatize the creation of VisualApplets designs (a former Silicon Software GmbH technology), which is a nice and useful feature but not nice enough, in my opinion.
The main idea of the visualapplets.py project is to introduce an additional scripting abstraction and to script the creation of TCL scripts via Python.
Huh, to script a script? Too much meta? Let's study an example...
Example
In this example we will implement the ReLU operator, which functionally corresponds to y(x) = max(0, x).
Just for practical reasons, we encapsulate the operator logic in a HierarchicalBox. So it can be reused many times in a VisualApplets design. Consequently we also create a class in our Python script, for the same purpose of course.
We begin with the first part of the Python script example.py:
import visualapplets as VA
class Example(VA.Module):
def __init__(self, parent, name, x, y):
# initialize the HierarchicalBox (e.g. super)
super().__init__('HierarchicalBox', parent, name, i=1, o=1, x=x, y=y)
# create required modules inside the HierarchicalBox (e.g. self)
branch = VA.Module('BRANCH', self, 'Branch', o=3, x=1, y=1)
condition = VA.Module('IS_GreaterThan', self, 'Condition', x=2, y=2)
value = VA.Module('CONST', self, 'Value', x=2, y=3)
decision = VA.Module('IF', self, 'Decision', x=3, y=1)
# link created modules together, from left to right
self('INBOUND') - branch
branch(0) - decision('I')
branch(1) - condition - decision('C')
branch(2) - value - decision('E')
decision - self('OUTBOUND')
# for instance, set desired link properties
branch('I')['Bit Width'] = 16 # input link of the BRANCH
branch('I')['Arithmetic'] = 'signed'
value('O')['Bit Width'] = 16 # output link of the CONST
value('O')['Arithmetic'] = 'signed' # (needs to match the input link)
# for instance, set desired module properties
condition['Number'] = 0 # input value threshold
value['Value'] = 0 # output value below threshold
Now the second part of our Python script:
# dump generated TCL script to a file instead of stdout
VA.printer = VA.FilePrinter('example.tcl')
# create a design with an instance of the example module
design = VA.Design('mE5-MA-VCLx', 'Example')
example = Example(design, 'Example', x=1, y=2)
Finally import the generated example.tcl file in the VisualApplets IDE or execute something like this in the TCL console:
CloseDesign Discard
source "C:/foo/bar/example.tcl"
The resulting design should look similar to this one:
Basics
With the help of the previous example imagine now, how custom algorithms could be implemented without a deep TCL knowledge, but of course not without a certain amount of Python experience.
There are a few basic concepts to understand how the visualapplets.py works.
Module
...
Port
...
Link
...
Param
...
18.1k Jan 5, 2023
155 Dec 28, 2022
49 Nov 25, 2022
475 Jan 1, 2023
6 Oct 18, 2022
14 Nov 22, 2022
4 Mar 23, 2022
1 Dec 19, 2021
2 May 31, 2022
11 Nov 17, 2022
50 Jan 06, 2023
3 Sep 19, 2022
16 Dec 14, 2022
61 Sep 21, 2022
5 Dec 15, 2022
69 Jul 05, 2022
2 Dec 08, 2021
6 Nov 10, 2021
1 Jan 12, 2022
2 Jan 12, 2022
5 Nov 20, 2022
37 Dec 20, 2022
41 Nov 17, 2022
137 Dec 29, 2022
5 Sep 09, 2022
10 Dec 27, 2022
8 Mar 22, 2022
185 Dec 29, 2022
1 Feb 07, 2022