The Recorder Dialog

Recording data blocks

Previous Top Next

GSEOS is capable of real time data logging to standard Windows storage devices (hard disks, optical disks, etc.). These files can be played back for data evaluation purposes. In playback mode the Recorder module is the active data source and will provide all input data. The Recorder allows to record/play back any block that is defined in the system. The data is written in sequential manner only and no backward references are required, this allows the usage of strictly sequential writeable media like tape drives. The RecExport utility lets you dump recorder file contents to ASCII or binary files without using GSEOS to process with your off-line tools. The recorder file format has changed from version 5.1 to version 5.2. Version 5.2 and higher will still read the old format but versions 5.1 and lower won't be able to read 5.2 and up recorder files.

The user interface for the Recorder is shown below:

The Recorder dialog can be invoked from the View menu or with the F8 hotkey.
The caption bar incidates the instance number of the currently running GSEOS instance. The recorder can
be controlled with the following buttons:

	Playback single step reverse	Play back one data block in reverse direction. Only blocks on the playback list will be played back.
	Playback fast reverse	Start reverse fast playback. Only blocks on the playback list will be played back. The playback speed can be adjusted with the Settings Dialog.
	Stop	Stops the fast playback modes or the recording mode, depending on which is active.
	Record	Start recording of blocks. Only blocks on the record list will be recorded. When in recording mode the available disk space will be displayed in the status bar.
	Playback single step	Play back one data block.
	Playback fast	Start fast playback mode. Only blocks on the playback list will be played back. The playback speed can be adjusted with the Settings Dialog.
	Recorder settings	This opens the Recorder Settings dialog.
	Expand Recorder dialog	The More button expands the Recorder dialog and displays addional status information while recording or playing back.
	File mode	The file mode checkbox selects between automatic and single file mode. In automatic file mode the recorder automatically generates a file name for the data. The file will be closed once it reaches a threshold that can be set in the gseos.ini file in the [Recorder] section with the entry FileSize. A new file will be opened automatically and the recording continued. In single file mode you have to specify the file name to record to and no automatic file switching is performed. This mode is more suitable for quick recording of short periods of time.

The navigation slider at the bottom of the recorder dialog lets you quickly navigate through your data. You can select any time base that you have configured and navigate through your data by that time base. For more details on how to set up time bases for your recorder data please refer to the [Timebase] section of the gseos.ini file.

Recorder Settings Dialog

The Recorder Settings dialog allows you to specify several recorder options:

The data path edit box displays the current path for files generated in automatic mode. The path can be changed and will be saved in the gseos.ini file in the [Recorder] section. The prefix is the string that will be prepended to all automatically generated recorder blocks.
The playback speed can be set to a value between 1ms and 1s and is the time between two blocks are being played back.

The playback and recording list buttons open dialog windows to add or remove blocks from the playback or recording list respectively.

Note
The Recorder writes the GSEOS data blocks as binary data to the record medium. This means the interpretation of the data is left to the block definition. Therefore these two files have always be synchronized. Say you record data, later change the block definitions of the already recorded block in a way that is not compatible to the old format. E.g. new item has been inserted somewhere in the block. This will cause the recorder to generate 'wrong' data on playback since now the interpretation of the data has changed over the way it was interpreted when the data was recorded.
You should always back up your block definition files (and probably your monitor and decoder files as well) together with your recorder data files so you have a coherent snapshot of the system at a given time. A good version control system like CVS or Visual SourceSafe is highly recommended to support this task.

Programmatic Access:
The GesosRecorder module exports functions to perform most of the actions that can be accomplished with the Recorder dialog. Please refer to the GseosRecorder module for more details on how to script the recorder module.