Monday, January 26, 2015

STDF Viewer - Dev Update:

After spending time on understanding STDF file format, I went on to start coding. Note that I develop two versions - C++ and Javascript. The final product will be web based but I need to work on C++ as well because I'm still very new in Javascript. C++ is more of a fall back when checking if my algorithm is correct.

Here's what the sample program can do so far:

  • Open an STDF file and stream through the binary data.
  • Extract all STDF records
  • Identify the corresponding description of each record
  • Print all records in the output 

However, the above points are limited to the following:
  • It can only open x86 based files such as those created in Linux or Windows environment, Diamond and J750 testers specifically. Hint: Big/small endian
  • It does not check for validity of STDF file format with respect to record sequence
Now that I'm able to open an STDF file and extract its content, I need to plan on how I want to present its content in the application output - in this case, how will the webpage output look like. I need to know what information I can show and hide. I also need to decide what sort of user control I can add. I try to make this project as simple as possible but good enough to encourage users to use it. This will motivate me to keep working on this project and add more features.