Examples of EA for hardware-oriented projects?

[swherb]

Hello:  I am impressed by the organizational capabilities of EA and am playing with the idea of using it for collaborative development of a large embedded controls project (but not to the point of code generation, at least initially).  I understand that there is increasing interest in using UML2 for representation of embedded systems, but have found very little documentation on best practice use of UML elements for this.   Does anyone know of web (or other) resources such as example projects?  I am a novice with UML and project management and am still orienting myself, so any other suggestions for alternative tools are welcome;  so far the tool of choice is visio, and I see trouble ahead if we go much further down that path.  

[thomaskilian]

Visio? What do you want to do? Just draw squares and circles? Then it's a fine tool.

[Dave_Bullet]

Hi there,

I have an Infrastructure Architect who has made the switch from Visio to EA.  What we do is load everything as a stereotyped Node, then we associated each stereotype to some shape script / images so that the hardware diagrams look nice (not just UML boxes).

Although EA is not as pretty as Visio, the team realise the ability to re-use elements between models saves them heaps of time.  Since the infrastructure guys are using the same repository as the application guys - we can show links and dependencies which was impossible before with Visio.

So my suggestions:
1. Identify your hardware types
2. Setup a UML profile for them
3. Load each piece of hardware in the UML profile as a Node and associate an image with it

Then the hardware guys can just drag and drop these from the toolbox to model away...

David.

[swherb]

I should have been more specific.  We will have large numbers of processes at FPGA, DSP, and VME Crate processor level responsible for control of a high power superconducting RF system.  The issue is representing the signal flows and associated dependencies between the processes at different abstraction levels, presenting organized views of the architecture, and maintaining a data repository for the system.  My first attempts at representing data flows appropriate for such processes have suffered from lack of examples for using UML2 for embedded system modelling.  This is undoubtedly not the forte of EA but I was curious whether there are groups trying to use it for this, as an alternative to the high-priced competition (e.g. Artisan) which is more specialized in this direction.  I gather that with the SysML introduction Sparx is trying to provide some of these capabilities.