Demonstrating how to “Rewind” backwards and forwards through recorded traces with RapiTime 2.3

Rapita’s Dr Paul Emberson recently travelled to Cambridge to demo one of the new features from the latest version of RapiTime at The Embedded Masterclass 2010. Here he explains his thoughts on the day and the emerging benefits of the new software.

“The Embedded Masterclass event is both a trade show and conference with presentations and workshops.

“The day was an excellent opportunity to see what some of the big players in the embedded market are saying about their products.

“For example, Lauterbach were demoing their latest PowerTrace debuggers capable of capturing traces from an 8 core processor. Downloading trace data from Lauterbach debuggers is just one of the ways that RapiTime can be integrated with target systems.

“I enjoyed meeting Professor Michael Pont from the University of Leicester at Embedded Masterclass. I had met Michael previously at academic real-time conferences in my previous job as a research associate. It’s always interesting to meet advocates of time-triggered (as opposed to event-triggered) systems.

“Once I’d had a look at the stands it was time to set the RapiTime Rewind demo up on the SDC Systems stand.

“RapiTime Rewind allows users to step both backwards and forwards through recorded traces. This means you can use it like a debugger, except that you have the added ability to step back from the point a problem occurred to find the cause.

“Rewind also allows you to sit back and watch a replay of the trace while the source code automatically scrolls through the path that was taken during testing. This is great for grabbing attention at shows.

“I have been using the pre-release version of Rewind in the office and it has already proved its worth. I no longer need to open up giant trace text files and manually match instrumentation points to source code in order to discover why I didn't get the instrumentation point I expected.

“The great thing about improving RapiTime for our customers is that it makes my job easier too!”