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Open Source Engineering Software?
pipingguy asks: "A long-time subscriber to my piping design/engineering-related discussion list inquired about Open Source engineering software (and expressed an interest in moving to Linux), citing the high cost and often poor customer support of the commercial packages. Since there are quite a few non-Software Engineers reading Slashdot, I thought I'd ask a 'somewhat larger' userbase by posting the question here. What Open Source engineering software is out there and useful?"
You might try looking into Open Cascade with regards to industrial computer-aided drafting.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
I got my masters degree in engineering (M.Sc. - E) two days ago and for my thesis I used several open source tools designs for electrical engineering.
A site gathering many tools and aiming to be a complete design and analysis package is, gEDA: GPL Electronic Design Automation.
Another promising project is SystemC, which is an open source HDL (Hardware description language). The language is C-based and easy to learn (if you know C). With some (very expensive) commercial tools from Synopsys, it is possible to translate SystemC code to VHDL and do synthesis.
Moving a bit more towards software, but for embedded devices, a project from Berkeley is TinyOS. Completely open source.
Many things can be done without spending a dime but actual engineering, i.e. a product, does require commercial products before a design can be shipped of to the factory. But a startup can go a long way before spending anything on commercial software, very much like many software companies have done for many years now.
We use Eagle for all our PCB designs.
RFC1925
I forgot to tell that Eagle isn't open souce, but CadSoft have a free (as in beer) lisence.
RFC1925
Along these lines, don't forget about OpenCores which has many useful, downloadable VHDL cores which can be used to make very powerful designs. (Including an AVR core, MP3 decoder, ethernet MAC, some RISC/ARMs, SPI, and many, many more.)
Check out some of the free design flows (as in Free & GPLd)
It depends on where you put the apices:
:-D
Open "Source Engineering" Software? Here
"Open Source" "Engineering Software"? Here
"Open Source Engineering" Software? Here
Hope I've been of help but I doubt it!
My Stack Overflow user
What is "piping"? At first I thought this guy wanted some CAD software to design plumbing or something...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Man are in luck. Almost any modern Linux distro happens to include an Open Source pipe design/rendering package. It is called Pipes and it is very cool. It can be configured to completely automatically design and render pipe systems and you can do it manually if you want. It is light weight and very fast. It uses OpenGL for is high quality rendering.
/usr/X11R6/lib/xscreensaver/pipes
You can find it here: $
Hope this helps.
See GNU Octave and Scilab.
Electric is a CAD system for electrical engineers much like Cadence. See it here.
One of my senior projects for electrical engineering in college was to evaluate this product and compare it to commercial products like Cadence. My group found it robust, feature-rich, and even easier to use than its commercial counterparts.
--giving meaning to pencil necked g33k
See GNU Octave and Scilab.
Scientific Applications on Linux
The site lists both free and commerical applications.
For a drafting program, I would recommend QCad which is a nice GPL 2D drafting package. Unfortunatly I am not aware of any GPL 3D drafting programs which are either robust or mature enough for industrial use. Periodically I attempt to get TurboCad running under Wine, but while it seems to be getting closer to working, still no success yet.
Don't overlook the Python Programming Language which has a variety of extensions which make it very suitable for number crunching applications. Its is fairly easy to learn how to make GUI-based applications for specialized purposes, and its speed of development combined with robust error-checking and interpreted execution mode makes it ideal for implementing small engineering solutions.
Clickety Click
You might want to warn him about the high cost and poor customer support of open source packages. Different costs, but costs nonetheless.
Vertical applications is one area where free software has a long way to catch up still.
What is "piping"? At first I thought this guy wanted some CAD software to design plumbing or something...
Even if they were talking about plumbing, don't be surprised. Lots of mechanical engineers are employed designing building plumbing, HVAC and fire suppression systems, while lots of electrical engineers are designing the building's wiring, alarms, emergency lighting, elevator controls, etc. (To say nothing of the obvious civil and structural engineers who are responsible for the foundations and structure.)
Something as simple as plumbing ceases to be simple when you're going more than a few storeys in the air. What's the head of your municipal water system? Chances are, you'll need a pump so that the people in the penthouse will have the flushing toilets they've come to expect.
:)
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Most of the people suggesting alternatives do not make money with them.
Most of the open source software is a shadow of the alternatives in the commercial world. Octave is quaint, Electric.. ugh.. yeah, electric. There is spice, but there is nothing that even comes close to OrCAD, let along Analog Workbench from Cadence. The situation with digital tools for VHDL synthesis isn't much better.
3D wise, nothing compares even remotely to Solidworks or AutoCAD. Nor would I really expect it to. The best hope I have is that one of the big boys will get behind OS X and offer some of these tools for the Mac, and get them back on a UNIX platform in a useable form.
The big digital players DO have their tools available for linux, and I can give props to Mentor Graphics here (send me a t-shirt, ha). Solaris and Sun's horribly overpriced hardware have given them little choice.
Matlab is unmatched in third party support, optimizations, and speed. It is available for Mac and Linux.
But really, if you use these tools in the commercial field, their prices aren't that bad relative to the billing time or projects they're used for. I would, however, really like to see some synthesis tools for OS X from a major player, a good analog simulation tool, and SOLIDWORKS. Hey, anyone with influence. Mac. OS X. Solidworks. Dual G5. Please?
Yeah yeah yeah I can hear you call now. You could use the open source tools for a lot of stuff, but I can also design netlists on paper. Doesn't mean it's an attractive or efficient choice.
..don't panic
This question nicely illustrates what I have sometimes called "the Bill Gates advantage" relative to open source in some fields. For the most part, an open source solution requires that there be people with the knowledge of the specialized field where an application is used, the programming skills to build the tool, and the willingness to do so without financial reward. Most open source applications depend on the generousity of volunteers for their expertise. There are exceptions, where companies that sell services based on open source code can afford to pay a relatively small number of developers to work on the code itself. Even in those cases, the initial version of the application is often done on a volunteer basis. A firm selling an application can use that cash to hire both kinds of experts.
Please note that this is not a comment about the relative quality of code or support. Just that the commercial software model does address the issue of acquiring and directing needed resources directly.