Status Report

11-January-2005

Version 1.9.0 released

Added support for Comedi and RT-Linux Pro.
Added support for the Debian package build system. There is now a binary distribution of MRCI in the form of .deb Debian packages and .rpm packages for RPM-based Linux distributions, such as RedHat or Mandrake.

22-September-2004

Version 1.8.0 released

MRCI updated to work with RTAI 3.

1-December-2003

Version 1.7.0 released

Added functionality to support remote mode--that is, a mode in which MRCI can controlled from a remote computer via the network. A binary release of the remote client for Windows distributed separately.

24-May-2003

Version 1.6.0 released

Added commands "cd" and "pwd" which can change and print the current working directory. All MRCI commands that read or write files will use the current working directory.
Added support for shell commands: the user can now execute an arbitrary shell command from the MRCI command line. Shell commands must be prefixed by an exclamation mark.

21-March-2003

Version 1.5.0 released

Added support for RTAI. MRCI can now run under either RT-Linux or RTAI.
Added two extra features to the event interface: 1) ability to compare two system quantities in event specification; 2) each event now has a refractory period associated with it, which is a time interval after event occurrence when new events are not recorded.

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20-February-2003

Version 1.4.0 released

This release adds functionality for event detection: being able to record the occurrence, when e.g. system quantity Vin becomes greater than 0.1. Commands "add event", "enable event", "disable event", "del event", "reset event", "dump event" can be used to create and manipulate event specifiers, and write the event log to file.

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01-December-2002

Version 1.3.5 released

This release adds a few convenience features, most notably ability to save and load command history (thus allowing the commands issued in a MRCI session to be preserved in a file), and a command to load MRCI system modules from within the MRCI application itself; i.e. it is no longer necessary for the user to exit and enter MRCI again just to load another system file.

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20-October-2002

Version 1.3.0 released

This is a bug fix release, mostly aimed at giving the user ability to interrupt capture sessions, and not allowing Ctrl-C to exit the program.

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01-October-2002

Version 1.2.1 released

Bug fixes that enable the translator to correctly generate code for equations in the AT TIME START time block.

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29-August-2002

Version 1.2.0 released

Added "rampoff" command to turn off the currently active ramp.
Timing statistics now include information about the length of the computational cycle length; the core module measures the cycle length, in addition to the time between the beginning of each cycle.

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24-July-2002

Version 1.1.0 released

Added support for "playing" waveform buffers -- updating a variable with values take from a memory buffer containing waveform samples.
Two commands added to the script language, "load", and "play" for loading a file with sampled data in memory, and "playing" a buffer with data into a variable.

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15-July-2002

Version 1.0.3 released

Bug fixes in the script language parser -- improved handling of include files (`script' command).

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09-July-2002

Version 1.0.2 released

Bug fixes in the script language parser -- improved handling of inline comments.

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03-July-2002

Version 1.0.0 is released!

Features include:

General pupose modeling language -- no writing C code!
Supports two channels of acquisition and output
Complete manual with tutorial
Logged data has more system information stored in header
A special Emacs mode for editing .mrci (model description) files

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20-January-2002

We now have a variant of the 0.4 version of MRCI that works using 2 channels on (as far as we can tell) any E-series PCI board from National Instruments. At 25 kHz or faster. It is not well documented, but we've used it enough to be happy with its stabilitiy. We're also curious how well it works on other National Instruments E-series boards. Contact rbutera@ece.gatech.edu for more info.

In the works as well is an entirely new (from scratch) computational engine. It is not as fast as the old one, but model implementation will be a lot easier. This will probably not be documented and released until late-2002 or later, since it represents a major new milestone.

28-February-2001 -- version 0.4-alpha

This is a relatively UNTESTED release of version 0.4, which offers the following features:

Elimination of lookup tables (temporary) -- this makes model implementation a lot easier
No more parameters (everything is a variable) -- the makes model implementation easier
Ability to select which variables are logged during eposodic data captures
Captured data files now contain useful information about names of variables that were logged, computation rate, sampling rate, etc. It is also now easier to extract data from these log files.
Automatic filename/timestamp generation during experiments.
Internal redesign "paving" the way to multichannel I/O.
A "daq_wrapper" file for abstracting the particulars of your device driver to a single file with an API used by the MRCI computational engine.

We intend for the final version of 0.4 to support all E-series National Instruments boards (we are pursuing 2 possible solutions). Also, we intend to support multichannel acquisition, but it may be much slower than the single channel mode (5-10 kHz max) for the short term.

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Update: 14-Dec-2000

We are actively pursuing the following short-term directions:

A device driver (based on COMEDI) that allows high-speed (i.e. low latency) aquisition on multiple channels on all National Instruments E-series boards supported by COMEDI (Status 04-Feb-2001 -- low-latency single-cycle multichannel acquisition is posing serious technical difficulties, related to the design of National Instruments' boards).
An "easy to program" version that sacrifices performance (no lookup tables) for ease of model implementation.
An "easy to install" version that does not require installing Linux on your system. Rather, it is booted off of a CD.

18-Nov-2000 - version 0.3

This project has recently started. The current snapshop of our software below is neither easy-to-use nor well-documented, and requires a high-degree of Linux knowledge to get working. This version will ultimately be replaced by an entirely new package by summer 2001. If you wish to try out what we've got, you will need the following:

A PC with Linux installed
RT-Linux ver 2.2 or higher
A National Instruments DAQ board. Our home-made driver currently supports the AT-MIO-16E-1 and AT-MIO-16E-2. We will soon have a modified version of COMEDI released that supports most DAQ boards by National Instruments.

This version supports the following features:

interactive modification of state variables and parameters
interactive modification of cycle speed
episodic logging of ALL state variables and subsequent writing to disk
built-in timing analysis (so you know if you are running too fast)
one input channel, two output channels
up/down ramp protocol to variables
scripting support of interactive commands (useful for repeated experiments with sequences of parameter changes, logging, etc)
highly reliable up to 50 kHz

It also has a few bugs, of which many involve being rather unforgiving (*crash*) to user error.

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