Hi All,
I'll prefix this with, maybe I haven't spotted the obvious and it's actually possible to do this so please let me know if it is.
In replying to another question on here the other day it made me realise there appears to be a small shortcoming in the bus functionality when it comes to creating busses with arbitrarily named signals (rather than bus bit numbers for example). I'll highlight this with a few examples of what I would like to do, then what I actually need to do, and what I think would be a simple solution to the problem.
Example 1: I want to create two SPI busses to connect a microprocessor to various devices on a board on separate SPI busses (i.e. the microprocessor has two separate SPI controllers within it and I want to use them both).
I'd like to be able to use the following bus commands:
bus SPI1:!CS,SCK,MOSI,MISO
bus SPI2:!CS,SCK,MOSI,MISO
What I actually need to do is:
bus SPI1:!SPI1_CS,SPI1_SCK,SPI1_MOSI,SPI1_MISO
bus SPI2:!SPI2_CS,SPI2_SCK,SPI2_MOSI,SPI2_MISO
If I create a bus with the format DATA[0..15] it neatly expands to DATA0 through DATA15 within the bus, wouldn't it be nice if the bus name before the colon could be a prefix to the signal names specified (maybe with or without the example _ separator) within the bus? Then the first notation could be used and a simple up arrow after the first command is complete and change a 1 to a 2 will allow me to create a completely unique second bus and the internal wire names would then be !SPI1_CS, SPI1_SCK.... etc.... for the first bus and !SPI2_CS, SPI2_SCK.... etc.... for the second.
Now, what then needs to happen would be if I changed the name of a bus then all the signal names which were auto-prefixed by that bus should be automatically updated on all the wires connected to the bus. This bit may be harder to achieve but would be a real time saver if it could be done as it would allow for sections of schematics to be copied and pasted and then busses easily renamed so they were unique.
What do people think?
I'm going to post this separately in Eagle Central forums as it appears the link is broken again (after being back so very briefly last week!) so sorry if this becomes a duplicate when the link gets re-established.
Rachael