S-parameter viewer #936

andresmmera · 2024-09-08T06:53:49Z

I have added an S-parameter viewer to the Qucs-S toolset. The idea originated in #733 with the approval of ra3xdh.

The goal of this tool is to be able to read and display S-parameter data (for now, magnitude only). Basically I have ported to CPP the code from [1] and added some features like the ability to open n-port files and have data markers.

The tool is accessible from the Tools menu. It has a single window divided into three panels: one on the right (chart) and two stacked panels on the left (axis settings, file management, trace management and markers).

S-parameter files can be opened by dragging and dropping them onto the S-parameter files area. For 2-port files, the tool automatically displays S21, S11 and S22. It also automatically calculates important metrics for 2-port devices such as K, mu, MAG, etc.

If several s2p files are added on a row, it shows all the S21 traces.

The user can add data markers. Trace data is displayed in a table

This is an screencast showing how it works:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tMzdM6z_twqlb8ezXjk8dJaYi-Dm-o-e/view?usp=drive_link

I have tested a number of S-parameter files. I collected a few examples in this spreasheet. Please find in [2] the test workspace I used for this.

[1] https://rfdesigntools.pythonanywhere.com/tool/s-parameter-viewer
[2] SPAR Viewer Testbench_prj.zip

This commit contains the first draft of the user interface Read Touchstone files It was implemented a basic function to read Touchstone files. It can only read Touchstone files up to 4 ports and only S-parameter data. Please see "Touchstone Specification, Version 2.1, ratified January 26 2024 by the IBIS Open Forum": https://ibis.org/touchstone_ver2.1/ Add QScrollArea widgets to the files and traces lists Large number of files and traces are expected, so there is a need for scrollable areas in the files and traces lists. Basic plotting structure Add default behaviour when loading one single s2p A default behavior is added. When a single s2p file is selected, the program automatically displays S21, S11 and S22 Replace the "Delete" message by a trash image The delete image was taken from here https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Delete-button.svg This file is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license. You are free: to share – to copy, distribute and transmit the work to remix – to adapt the work Under the following conditions: attribution – You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the license, and indicate if changes were made. You may do so in any reasonable manner, but not in any way that suggests the licensor endorses you or your use. share alike – If you remix, transform, or build upon the material, you must distribute your contributions under the same or compatible license as the original. Read Touchstone files with more than two ports Update traces combobox depending on the selected dataset If the user has loaded data with different number of ports, the traces combobox must be refreshed each time the user changes the dataset selection. Otherwise, this may cause that the user selects a non existing trace Fix style in buttons for removing files The QPushButtons were replaced by QToolButtons. With the QPushButtons the widget was too wide Fix style in buttons for removing traces QPushButton was converted into QToolButton Delete dataset and its traces when the user decides to remove a file Remove files and traces Rework on the logic on how to remove datasets and traces After removing a file, remove the associated widgets Remove trace from Chart Update file widget position in the grid after removing Function handler for changing the color of a trace Change linestyle depending on the combo selection Set initial color of the color pickers Added a spinbox control to control the trace width It was added a spinbox that controls the width of the traces displayed. This is very convenient when a bunch of traces are being displayed and the user wants to highlight one of them easily Added function handler for controlling the x-axis A handler function was added to control the x-axis settings as the user changes the minimum, maximum or the tick interval Update traces when changing the axis settings Fix trace plotting refresh Fix frequency limits when loading a GHz range file Dockable widgets Autoadjust y-axis settings Automatically add K, delta, mu_s, m_p, MAG and MSG traces in S2P files When a Touchtone file has two ports, the stability metrics are automatically computed and added to the dataset Add marker table feature It was added a new dock consisting on a marker table and some widgets for its management Add dot marker and vertical lines in the QChart Make case insensitive the frequency scale Files were found were the frequency scale is all in capital letters. This creates a problem when reading the spar data. This commit fixes this by putting the frequency scale in lower case Auto adjust x-axis when changing the units Put x_div values as a ComboBox It makes no much sense in having a decimal spinbox for defining the tick interval. It leads to decimal ticks. It's better to have a closed list of possible values y axis tick in combobox Fix vertical line markers Fix bad "About Qt" connection The "About Qt" message was not properly connected. As a consequence, when the user went to "Help-> About Qt..." nothing showed up. This commit is intended to fix this by connecting the menu with the handler as it's done in the filter design tool Link S-parameter viewer to Qucs-S Add Re{Zin}, Im{Zin} traces to s1p and s2p files Hide y-axis units It makes no much sense for now to have it since it may happen that the y-axis represent dB, Ohm or simply its unitless (e.g. K, mu, ...) Fix segfault when removing one single file In previous commits, it was observed a segfault when removing one single s-par file. This happened because the program was freeing widgets already freed. This situation is avoided by ordering the list of widgets to remove Autoadjust y-axis Remove widgets for marker placement They are actually not needed. The SpinBox and the combo with units just add clutter. The user can set the marker freq once added Update x-axis limits after removing file Increase maximum x-ticks Get suffix using Qt method This is more robust than the previous approach Fix frequency scale in markers Enable drag and drop to open files Fix segfault when removing file Readjust frequency limits when dataset has no traces Fix read touchstone Files were found whose header contains no ! Fix initial marker step Fix autoscale y-axis Prevent docks from closing It makes no sense the user can close the docks Solve infinite loop when fmax=3000 [unit] Implemented button for removing all files on a row Implement button for removing all markers on a row

andresmmera · 2024-09-08T07:02:56Z

Any guess on how to fix this?

ra3xdh · 2024-09-08T07:18:58Z

Thanks for the contribution! I will evaluate the new tool and report the feedback. The most probably I will merge this after preparing v24.3.1 package. Or maybe I will cancel the 24.3.1 release and make 24.4.0 including a new tool instead.

Any guess on how to fix this?

The qtcharts should be added in .github/workflows/deploy.yml according this guide: https://github.com/jurplel/install-qt-action

ra3xdh · 2024-09-08T09:55:14Z

The CI still failing but another error appears:

No rule to make target '/home/vvk/qucs_s/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.hspar_viewerf', needed by 'qucs-s-spar-viewer/moc_qucs-s-spar-viewer.cpp'.  Stop.

I am getting the same error when trying to build a new tool locally. This is not related to CI. I guess some files may be presented locally but missing in commit.

andresmmera · 2024-09-08T10:05:39Z

I see. I'll check that later.

andresmmera · 2024-09-08T18:04:46Z

I am getting the same error when trying to build a new tool locally. This is not related to CI. I guess some files may be presented locally but missing in commit.

You need to install "libqt5charts5-dev".

I set up a fresh Lubuntu 24.04 in a VM and followed the instructions you provide in README:

sudo apt-get install ngspice build-essential git cmake qtbase5-dev qttools5-dev libqt5svg5-dev flex bison gperf dos2unix
git submodule init
git submodule update
mkdir builddir
cd builddir
cmake ..  -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=/your_install_prefix/
make
make install

After installing "libqt5charts5-dev" it went fine.

I'll continue tomorrow with this stuff.

ra3xdh · 2024-09-08T18:15:27Z

You need to install "libqt5charts5-dev".

I am using Qt6. Bot qt5-chart and qt6-charts development version are installed on my machine. Need further investigations.

dsm · 2024-09-09T06:49:12Z

I tried to include Qtcharts like this #include <QtCharts/QtCharts>

and CI compiler give error this line using namespace QtCharts; QtCharts is not a name space name

ra3xdh · 2024-09-09T06:50:31Z

and CI compiler give error this line using namespace QtCharts; QtCharts is not a name space name

See this note: https://doc.qt.io/qt-6/qtcharts-changes-qt6.html Some version-depedent code is needed here.

ra3xdh · 2024-09-09T07:10:39Z

@andresmmera Try to apply the following patch. It fixes the Qt6 build. Now I am able to build the tool locally using the Qt6.7.2 on Linux.

diff --git a/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.cpp b/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.cpp
index 75b6dacd..79d53c33 100644
--- a/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.cpp
+++ b/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.cpp
@@ -39,7 +39,7 @@
 Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer()
 {
 
-  QWidget *centralWidget = new QWidget(this);  
+  QWidget *centralWidget = new QWidget(this);
   setCentralWidget(centralWidget);
 
   setWindowIcon(QPixmap(":/bitmaps/big.qucs.xpm"));
@@ -560,7 +560,7 @@ void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::addFiles(QStringList fileNames)
           //qDebug() << line;
 
            if (line.isEmpty()) continue;
-           if ((line.at(0).isNumber() == false) && (line.at(0) != "#")) {
+           if ((line.at(0).isNumber() == false) && (line.at(0) != '#')) {
                if (file_data["frequency"].size() == 0){
                    // There's still no data
                    continue;
@@ -572,7 +572,7 @@ void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::addFiles(QStringList fileNames)
 
            }
            // Check for the option line
-           if (line.at(0) == "#"){
+           if (line.at(0) == '#'){
 
                QStringList info = line.split(" ");
                frequency_unit = info.at(1); // Specifies the unit of frequency.
@@ -1443,7 +1443,7 @@ void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::updateTraces()
         QString data_file = trace_name_parts[0];
         QString trace_file = trace_name_parts[1];
 
-        if (trace_file.at(0) == "S"){
+        if (trace_file.at(0) == 'S'){
             trace_file = trace_file + QString("_dB");
         }
         if (trace_file == QString("|%1|").arg(QChar(0x0394))){
@@ -1603,7 +1603,7 @@ void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::checkFreqSettingsLimits(QString filename, double& fmin,
                 disconnect(QCombobox_x_axis_units, SIGNAL(currentIndexChanged(int)), this, SLOT(updatePlot())); // Needed to avoid duplicating the call to the update function
                 disconnect(QSpinBox_x_axis_max, SIGNAL(valueChanged(int)), this, SLOT(updatePlot())); // Needed to avoid duplicating the call to the update function
                 disconnect(QSpinBox_x_axis_min, SIGNAL(valueChanged(int)), this, SLOT(updatePlot())); // Needed to avoid duplicating the call to the update function
-                QCombobox_x_axis_units->setCurrentIndex(index+1);               
+                QCombobox_x_axis_units->setCurrentIndex(index+1);
                 QSpinBox_x_axis_min->setValue(fmin);
                 QSpinBox_x_axis_max->setValue(fmax);
                 connect(QCombobox_x_axis_units, SIGNAL(currentIndexChanged(int)), SLOT(updatePlot()));
@@ -1643,7 +1643,7 @@ void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::checkFreqSettingsLimits(QString filename, double& fmin,
 void Qucs_S_SPAR_Viewer::adjust_y_axis_to_trace(QString filename, QString tracename){
     qreal minX, maxX, minY, maxY;
 
-    if (tracename.at(0) == "S"){
+    if (tracename.at(0) == 'S'){
         tracename = tracename + QString("_dB");
     }
     if (tracename == QString("|%1|").arg(QChar(0x0394))){
diff --git a/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.h b/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.h
index ebfb67f7..1c801bb1 100644
--- a/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.h
+++ b/qucs-s-spar-viewer/qucs-s-spar-viewer.h
@@ -13,7 +13,9 @@
 #include <QtGlobal>
 #include <complex>
 
+#if QT_VERSION < QT_VERSION_CHECK(6,0,0)
 using namespace QtCharts;
+#endif
 
 class QComboBox;
 class QTableWidget;

andresmmera · 2024-09-09T07:12:42Z

Thanks Vadim.

I'll apply that ASAP, probably this afternoon.

dsm · 2024-09-09T07:13:08Z

I think this line should be this, #if QT_VERSION < QT_VERSION_CHECK(6,0,0)

ra3xdh · 2024-09-09T07:18:12Z

I think this line should be this, #if QT_VERSION < QT_VERSION_CHECK(6,0,0)

Yes, the QtCharts namespace was deprecated since 6.0.0

andresmmera · 2024-09-09T19:59:09Z

I have updated my Qt setup to v6.7.2. I've applied the patch above. Let's see what happens with the CI.

dsm · 2024-09-09T20:50:44Z

You have to add qt6-charts:p under pacboy in ci for windows and move qt5charts installation line in appimage qt6 to cmake.yml

ra3xdh · 2024-09-10T10:40:59Z

I have just checked Qt5.15 and Qt6.2.4 build on Ubuntu-22.04. Both Qt version setup compiles and works as expected. @andresmmera Please add the libqt5charts5-dev dependency in the .github/workflows/cmake.yml This will fix the Qt5 CI build.

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T10:51:20Z

Sure. I'll do so this evening

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T15:08:22Z

Done. Thank you @dsm and @ra3xdh

Remove unneeded CMakeLists in bitmaps folder Add qucs-s-spar-viewer.icns This is required for the "build-mac-universal" and "build-mac-intel" jobs Install libqt5charts5-dev dependency I set up a fresh Lubuntu 24.04 on a VM and compiled the code from source using the instructions provided in the Qucs-S page. I found that to avoid the above error in the build, you need to install "libqt5charts5-dev" first. After that the compilation went fine. I'm not sure if it works with "libqt6charts6-dev". I'll check later. Typo in CMakeLists Remove unneeded include causing trouble in build appImage-Qt6 /home/runner/work/qucs_s/qucs_s/qucs-s-spar-viewer/main.cpp:28:10: fatal error: QDesktopWidget: No such file or directory 28 | #include <QDesktopWidget> Missing line in windows build Patch provided by ra3xdh QtCharts Update cmake.yml and deploy.yml Added qt6-charts to Windows build and qt5charts to Qt5 build

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T15:35:03Z

It gave no errors.
Squashing the CI related commits.

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T15:44:02Z

I've found some warnings in the Qt6 build. I want to fix them before you merge this.

For some reason, I'm not catching them locally in QtCreator.

ra3xdh · 2024-09-10T16:16:51Z

Is it ready for merge now?

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T16:32:09Z

Yes. I think it's ready

dsm · 2024-09-10T16:45:11Z

New tool is missing in macos ci, copy this tool to in qucs.app and run macdeployqt like other tools, there are two macos ci.

Copied in to build dir as qucs-sspar-viewer.app and run macdeployqt

andresmmera · 2024-09-10T18:03:49Z

New tool is missing in macos ci, copy this tool to in qucs.app and run macdeployqt like other tools, there are two macos ci.

Done. Thank you!

dsm · 2024-09-11T07:33:15Z

I'll try to test this tool on MacOS this evening

andresmmera · 2024-09-12T06:13:25Z

@ra3xdh Don't merge this PR yet. I've found that the tool can load the same file twice.

I want to fix this issue before merging. I'll try to fix today.

This commit gets rid of QPalette. It doesn't work well on Windows. The color of the button is forced using the stylesheet.

andresmmera · 2024-09-13T07:44:21Z

I've also added a commit to fix a wrong behaviour concerning the button styles in Windows.

andresmmera · 2024-09-13T07:47:21Z

An aesthetic detail related to #929: I have noticed that Qucs-S shows the new icon but the tools keep an old one.

Should this be updated or left as it is?

dsm · 2024-09-13T08:41:10Z

I think you can keep as it is, in macos, tools has different icon from qucs-s but that icon has only .icns file has not svg file so we should design a new icon for tools or use qucs-s.svg anywhere. @ra3xdh what do you think about it?

ra3xdh · 2024-09-13T13:16:18Z

@ra3xdh what do you think about it?

Let's keep the icons as is.

ra3xdh · 2024-09-15T07:06:17Z

I am merging this. I think the tool is mostly ready for usage. @andresmmera , Please stay connected if some feedback will appear from users after testing the next continuous release.

andresmmera · 2024-09-15T07:51:39Z

Ok, no worries

ra3xdh added this to the 24.4.0 milestone Sep 8, 2024

andresmmera force-pushed the SPAR_Viewer branch from d74a3d1 to 68028c2 Compare September 8, 2024 09:37

ra3xdh self-requested a review September 8, 2024 11:14

ra3xdh added new feature RF tools labels Sep 8, 2024

andresmmera force-pushed the SPAR_Viewer branch from 567a24d to 0258a7e Compare September 10, 2024 15:34

Fix auto-adjust y-axis

933d130

ra3xdh approved these changes Sep 10, 2024

View reviewed changes

andresmmera added 2 commits September 10, 2024 17:49

Fix warnings

1317db5

Fix auto-adjust x-axis

9b67b2e

Add tool to macos CI

5e227ff

Copied in to build dir as qucs-sspar-viewer.app and run macdeployqt

andresmmera added 2 commits September 13, 2024 07:13

Prevent the tool from adding the same file twice

ab835c0

Color button update

eb87621

This commit gets rid of QPalette. It doesn't work well on Windows. The color of the button is forced using the stylesheet.

andresmmera force-pushed the SPAR_Viewer branch from 9e8af1b to eb87621 Compare September 13, 2024 07:37

ra3xdh merged commit 694db71 into ra3xdh:current Sep 15, 2024
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S-parameter viewer #936

S-parameter viewer #936

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S-parameter viewer #936

S-parameter viewer #936

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