Whats New Q1 2025

We're excited to share highlights from the first quarter of 2025, featuring several awesome updates that simplify your experience with hardware. We've rolled out analog-to-digital sensor support and its inverse, digital-to-analog. Pictorus now formally supports Functional Mockup Units (FMUs), allowing you to easily import existing plant simulations from Julia, Modelica or Simscape. With Atomic Update Rates, you get fine-grained control of execution timing, allowing different components to execute at discrete frequencies. Embedded targets now have native telemetry support. Finally, for clients dealing with the federal government, we've introduced GovCloud hosting to enable cloud storage of sensitive IP.

Digital-to-Analog Converter

We've added a dedicated DAC block for STM32 boards, enabling you to generate precise analog output signals directly from your digital sources. Ideal for applications like waveform generation, motor control, and audio output, this feature further enhances the library of protocols making it easy to communicate with hardware.

Analog-to-Digital Sensor Input

We’ve also added an Analog-to-Digital block. Now, you can effortlessly read and process analog signals from a variety of sensors, such as temperature, pressure, or sound directly within your models. This expands your ability to handle real-world signal processing in embedded applications, especially for scientific sensors and high frequency devices.

Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs)

We’ve added support for Functional Mock-up Units (FMUs), allowing for simplified integration and co-simulation with third-party tools like Julia, Modelica, and SimScape. FMUs streamline your workflow by providing a standardized way to package and distribute your models across different simulation environments, boosting compatibility and collaboration. This is especially powerful for users with large, complex legacy simulations they'd like to import and interact with within Pictorus.

Atomic Update Rates

Ensuring deterministic timing in safety-critical applications is vital. With our new Atomic Update Rates feature, you gain fine-grained control over block execution timing, enabling precise timing across your models and control loops. 

Any component within an application can execute at any integer multiple of the app's fundamental update rate. This allows high frequency apps to embed low frequency components, typically when some computationally-intensive subsystem (maybe a Kalman filter) needs to run less frequently than raw sensor readings.

By default, components inherit their parent's update rate. They can be configured to run more slowly, but no faster than their parent. This means some thought must be given to the design of applications with nested update rates, to ensure high frequency subsystems are not buried within low frequency parents.

Embedded Telemetry

Embedded Telemetry is one of the features we’ve been most excited to see.  Previously, telemetry would "just work" out of the box for applications deployed to Linux operating systems. But if you wanted to stream telemetry from an embedded target, you'd need to broker it through another application on a Linux motherboard.

It is now easy to see telemetry from STM32 devices directly. By simply connecting signals of interest to the appropriate visualization, the new Embedded Telemetry feature allows you to see real-time telemetry directly on your web browser, by automatically brokering through your Pictorus DeviceManager. Effortlessly stream data back for viewing and storage in the cloud and for review later.

GovCloud Deployment

For our partners in regulated industries, we’re excited to announce deployment support on AWS GovCloud. Now, your models and applications can securely run in a cloud environment designed specifically to meet stringent government compliance requirements. Enjoy the flexibility and power of the cloud without compromising security or compliance.

See you at Xponential?

This May the Pictorus team will be presenting at the Xponential autonomy conference in Houston, Texas. If you'll be around, drop us a line in advance! We will be manning a booth full of robots, and hosting an industry happy hour Tuesday evening. See you there!