Open Source Engineering Tools?

ThosLives asks: "It seems to be the case that most open source projects fall into the software development, business, and desktop realms. I have done a bit of unfruitful searching for good FOSS engineering tools. By this I mean: 3D CAD/CAM, FEA, fluids, and math simulation tools. I have been able to find various 'academic quality' FEA, fluids, and math sim tools; those are, however, not sufficient for even hobby-level production work because they: have a lacking interface; don't have a standard file formats; and are not standalone products (i.e., they require Matlab or some other expensive package). If you were going to set up an engineering shop to design and produce mechanical devices, what FOSS software tools, if any, are available and recommended? Commercial options are out of the question for the hobbyist, when even basic 3D CAD functionality typically costs more than $100 (and typically run over $500), and 'consumer-level' analysis packages are practically nonexistent. If there are no free options, what could be done with a budget of $500 or $1000? As an aside, are there any thoughts on why the engineering applications appear to be so overlooked by the open source community?"

Comments

KTechLab

[Richard Dick Head]

While still in alpha, KTechLab looks pretty promising for layout and simulation.

Re:KTechLab

[harrkev]

In a similar manner, look at http://www.geda.seul.org/

But these are electrical engineering tools. The original article seemed to be more about mechanical engineering tools. My guess is that people write what they need and what interestes them. Mechanical engineers might not have as much software skill as other diciplines. Mechanical engineering seems more "physical" and likely appeals to a different type of person than electrical engineering and computer engineering. Of course, I could just be a biased EE.

Re:KTechLab

[Skagit]

The parent is right. MechE and CivE students come out of college with little or no formal programming classes under their belt - unless it is a hobby. There are courses in using CAD (which have replaced mechanical drafting courses) and usually some courses complementary to finite element method software and matrix structural analysis. There, the focus is on figuring out what the software does (ie. building and decomposing degree-of-freedom matrices) rather than how the software does what it does. In order to pack in mechanics, materials and the host of various disciplines while teaching to the Fundamentals of Engineering exam, software suffers. Thus, you don't get many people who can analyze swidesway-inhibited multistory structures and can make code to give it a good user interface.

Still, as others have mentioned, Autodesk's products are ubiquitous. AutoCAD interfaces with several popular structural analysis and FEA packages, the number of FOSS add-ons is pretty immense and you can send a release-14 file, readable by just about anybody. If you want to customize it by interfacing with CAM or analysis, it comes with a version of LISP. Try to save cash somewhere else and pony up the $2.5K for AutoCAD. I think AutoCAD is like Excel - open source is going to take a long time to catch up.

You might find some real niche programs that somebody wrote for the problem at hand and take elements from it for what you need. I think if you collect enough stuff, organize it and put it on Sourceforge, you might get something useful back.

BRL-CAD

[NaNO2x]

Haven't looked at this much, but I remember when someone was asking about the same sort of thing this link came up and looked fairly interesting. http://brlcad.org/

Look at available NASA tools

[RockClimbingFool]

For fluids, you really can't beat Overflow and its associated tools. Written by some of the guys at AMES, its open source and comes with decent grid generation tools. I am not a structures guy, but isn't NASTRAN an industry standard NASA FEA tool?

try octave

[blackcoot]

http://octave.org/ i suggest you get the cvs version. most matlab scripts will just work, unless they're mex files (in which case you're s.o.l.). that makes a lot of the packages you mentioned at least possible.

as for the meat of your question, i suggest you try to write one of the pieces of software you mentioned --- the exact reasons for why they're hard to find in general will become apparent pretty quickly.

OpenCascade

[jungd]

http://www.opencascade.org/

It is a big package far more capable that most commercial apps and is open source.

CAD is the biggest niche there is

[digitect]

CAD is hardly niche. AutoDesk (makers of AutoCAD) made $1 billion in profits last year.

Take the US Construction industry, 4.8 percent of the U.S. GDP. That's $1.1 trillion. Now figure that most architectural firms I know (I'm an architect) have a copy for every intern, drafter and architect they have. That's a ballpark of 113,000 people. The same then goes for the mechanical, electrical, plumbing, structural, civil, landscape architect, and survey design professions. Also, most owners have a facilities department, they all use AutoCAD. Nearly all larger contractors have a copy, as well as most smaller specialty shops like cabinet makers, hardware manufacturers, etc. Throw in all the units at colleges and universities for the students in these professions to use. This is just the construction industry! We haven't even counted industries like automotive (not just cars, think parts), transportation, aerospace, electronics, toys, pharmaceutical equipment, and whatever else I forgot.

Free Software versions are not around, but there is a huge market for CAD software. It's not easy, it's not shiney...and it's not niche.

CAx software

[Noksagt]

Mostly from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_open_source_s oftware_packages. I've used most, usually for some part of a design or analysis. You could do engineering with only these (people used to not use computers at all), but you are correct that they aren't always "polished." They do, however, work fine for the patient, idealistic hobbyist who doesn't want to spend much money:

• CAE Linux - A LiveCD which lets you try out SALOME and Code-Aster
• Quanitan - A LiveCD with QCad,
• Impact - Finite element
• QCad - 2D CAD
• BRL-CAD - 3D CAD
• Open CASCADE - software development platform for 3D CAD, CAM, CAE, etc.
• Code_Aster - FEM
• Salome - pre/post processing

Re:Ask Slashdot Template

[psykocrime]

Actually, the only app I've had real problems replacing is MS Project, ironically I need it for my Software engineering degree; You'd think developers had no need for project management tools. Maybe I should submit an ask slashdot? ;)

Have you looked at http://www.openworkbench.org/? It's a formerly commercial PM package that went opensource a while back.

Yes

[4of12]

You can go one of two ways for FEA.

• Shrink-wrapped software for the PC, with nice Windows GUIs, with proprietary file formats, with good support built-in for other proprietary file formats, particularly for geometry.
• Open source software with greater cross-platform portability but decidedly less friendly GUI's, much less support for the variety of proprietary file formats.

As one promising application in open source FEA, take a look at Gmsh.

Part of the problem is that there is whole sequence to typical FEA

1. Geometry creation, editing and repair.
2. Discretization, meshing.
3. Analysis.
4. Visualization.

Traditionally, analysis has been decoupled from geometry, using very simple low order elements to do the calculations. Visualization, likewise, can be done based on millions of linear tetrahedra, hexahedra, or surface patches.

Now, it seems increasingly useful if higher order, global geometric information (eg, NURBS) could be made part of some finite element analyses and passed back and forth more easily through each phase of analysis. I keep hoping that OpenCascade or perhaps something like X3D provides a geometry engine that is open and is useful to FEA.

When you get down to it, much FEA shares a lot with the gaming community in terms of needs for geometry, surface discretization, and visualization.

Perhaps my dream FEA FOSS geometry representation will be realized when someone in the gaming community decides to use FEA to help render more physically realistic scenes rather than faking things that look realistic enough but cheat (and why not?) on the physics with a less computationally expensive algorithm.

another CAD program

[andylievertz]

Is this helpful to you, or have I misunderstood the question?

QCAD

Re:Ask Slashdot Template

[kiatoa]

Taskjuggler looks very good also: http://www.taskjuggler.org/