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BLADE Viewer

BLADE Viewer is a NodeJS web app for browsing DesignFormat blobs generated by BLADE. It allows the user to visually explore a design's hierarchy and trace interconnections between ports on different blocks. It also provides the ability to inspect a block or port to determine basic properties.

Getting Started

You will need to install NodeJS on your system, the preferred way of doing this is to use NVM (further details are available on GitHub):

$> curl -o- https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nvm-sh/nvm/v0.35.1/install.sh | bash
$> . ~/.bashrc
$> nvm install 12.13.1
$> nvm alias default 12.13.1

Then you will need to clone a copy of BLADE Viewer - a recursive clone is used to also pull down a copy of DesignFormat:

$> git clone --recursive [email protected]:/bluwireless/blade-viewer

Next you need to install the dependencies for BLADE Viewer using NPM (Node Package Manager):

$> cd blade-viewer
$> npm install

Now you can start up a local server on port 8085 (edit config.js to change the default port number):

$> node index.js

Finally, navigate to http://localhost:8085 in a web browser on the same machine you are running the server. You should see the welcome page asking you to provide a path to the DesignFormat blob on the disk.

Running BLADE Viewer as a Service

If you want to run BLADE Viewer on a shared machine as a central service, we recommend using PM2 to manage the Node JS process. It's really simple to get up and running:

$> npm install -g pm2
$> cd blade-viewer
$> pm2 start index.js --name BLADE

Acknowledgements

BLADE Viewer uses a number of third party libraries which are subject to their respective licenses:

• Bootstrap - CSS layout library
• Spinkit - CSS spinners
• Bootstrap Toggle - Toggle switch for Bootstrap
• JSZip - Compression for transferring DesignFormat blobs
• Random Color - Javascript library for choosing a random color
• jsTree - Interactive hierarchical tree browser
• FontAwesome - CSS icon font
• Comfortaa - Google Comfortaa font