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?"

Comments

You might try

[Kethinov]

You might try looking into Open Cascade with regards to industrial computer-aided drafting.

gEDA, SystemC and TinyOS

[KarmaPolice]

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.

Schematic capture and printed circuit board design

[geirt]

We use Eagle for all our PCB designs.

Electric

[Pngmalion]

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.

Scientific Applications of Linux

[The_Dougster]

The following webiste has served as a central index for engineering and scientific related applications which run on Linux, and it has been around for quite a while.

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.