Freemaster 3.1 feedback

[Bohrfutter]

Hello Freemaster-Team,

Thanks for the great tool and the time it saved me during MCU development.
I have some feedback and some questions for the new revision:

• If Freemaster shows dialog “Missing Symbol Definition” and you change to another application (ALT+TAB) Freemaster application crash (application closed without any notice).
• Is it possible to have all project tree items closed when the project is loaded? In general, you start with an overview and then go into the details… (I know you have the XML project file – but this needs ages to load…)
• Do you have plans to support 64bit? I am using a lot of VBA Excel marcros to automate Freemaster tasks (like EoL tests, export/import of ECU parameters etc). Unfortunately our IT installs Excel 64bit to the company laptops...

Thank you in advance
Best regards
Sebastian

[MichalH]

Dear Sebastian,

thank you for your feedback and for the bug report. 

To your points:

• I cannot repeat the crash when Missing Symbol Definitions dialog is open and you switch to different app. Can you provide more details about steps you do when it crashes? (is port open/closed?, is project using active control page?, is it ELF or TSA symbol missing?, ...) Thanks.
• We will add the tree state storing to PMP file format as well - I understand that migrating to PMPX may not be always wanted.
• Even Excel 64bit should be able to create the 32-bit FreeMASTER "McbPcm" object and access the FreeMASTER services (just like the User Guide describes). Please tell if it does not work in your case.

Thanks,
Michal

[Bohrfutter]

Hi Micha,

thank you very much for your response. Here some comments from my side:

• Please find this video showing the effect: https://youtu.be/WlqGWspiNZk 
• Perfect! But closing all items would already be enough...
• Yes you are right! I was very afraid about all the problems with 32bit dll in a 64bit process - but with ActiveX Freemaster has it's own process.

Best regards

Sebastian

[MichalH · Accepted solution]

Hello Sebastian,

thank you for your cooperation on crash fixing. The fix will appear in the next version.

Please note that the Context Menu in the Project Tree already has a command to expand or collapse all child nodes. Try to do "Collapse" when the project root item is selected - it will walk through all top-level child items and will collapse them individually.

Regards,
Michal

[Bohrfutter]

Hello Michal,

The collapse command works like charm - and the bugfix as well!

Here I have some other improvment suggestions:

Is it possible to have a comment coloumn for the "variable watch" - sometimes it would just be nice to write some additional information for one variable.

We are often working with error flags in a bit field. Is it possible to have "bit field enum"? For every activated bit the output is build like  0b1000 0101 = "err1 err3 err8 ".

Is it possible to have 4 bits grouped if show as BIN is activated e.g. "0b0011 0110 1111 0011"

We have an array (uint16_t var_array[12]) and an index (uint8_t i) in the MCU code. Is it possible to show var_array[i] in the variable watch?

Best regards

Sebastian

[MichalH]

Hello Sebastian,

thanks for your feedback. Here are some answers to your questions.

• Good idea about the "comment column" and 4-bits grouping. Will address this in one of the next versions. 

• About the bit-field enums: I would rather recommend a workaround to create individual variables representing each bitfield and create a text-enumerations for them. In FreeMASTER 3.1 you can now share the single enumeration definition by multiple variables. This is a better / more universal solution in terms of bitfield modification etc.

• For the array indexing you can use the valueof() operator in the address field. This operator returns a variable value. You should be able to set an address of such special variable to  var_array[valueof(i)]. 
  
  You just need to be careful about the "i" variable definition. Its sampling rate will determine whether the index will be read always before reading the indexed var_array element or whether a cached value will be used. In case you set the "i" sampling to "0 fastest", it will be read anytime the var_array element is read. In case you set the sampling period slower, a cached value of "i" may be used if reading var_array element more often. 

Regards,
Michal