Travis Oliphant wrote: [...] > I would love to see some good contributions in the area of Simulink-like > work. There are several things out there that are good starts.
Even though I praised Simulink highly in the previous contribution, I don't think that it would be a good way to mimic it. That way (the way that, for instance, Scilab/Scicos is going) you will only be SECOND. What I like (still as a newcomer) about Scipy/Numpy is that it does not try to be Matlab for poor. You (I mean the community) can take an inspiration BY THE USE, but please, don't look too much on Matlab. Let's create somethink better even at the cost of not being compatible and perhaps requiring some learing effort from Matlab users. I keep my fingers crossed for Octave project, which is kind of free (GNU GPL) Matlab clone, but at the same moment I can recognize their limits in being JUST A CLONE. The leaders of Octave project do realize this danger but user kind of dictate compatibility with Matlab. To be finally more specific, there is some discussion going on in the systems&control community as to "block-diagram vs. equation-based modelling". I am not a guru in dynamic systems modeling but in my humble opinion it is worth considering something like Modelica language http://www.modelica.org/ as the ground for modeling in Python. There is a young free implementation called OpenModelica http://www.ida.liu.se/~pelab/modelica/OpenModelica.html. A commercial implementation is produced by Dynasim and is called Dymola http://www.dynasim.com/ and can at least give an inspiration, showing that from a user point of view, it is also just graphical blocks that are being connected to build a model. To make it clear, I am not a proponent of the above mentioned tools, I just came across these a couple of days ago when searching for an alternative to Simulink (commercial of free) and I found the whole Modelica movement interesting and perhaps the only one with significant development effort investment. >> But what makes Matlab difficult to be replaced is that lots of other >> projects (commercial: Mathematica, Maple, ... and free: octave, maxima, >> scipy, ...) only offer computation and visualization, while engineers in >> my field also need INTERACTION OF THE SYSTEM WITH EXTERNAL WORLD. That >> is, compatibility with a real-time operating system and MOST available >> input-output (AD-DA) cards. > The only way to solve this is to get more users interested in making > these kinds of things happen. Or to start a company that does this and > charges for a special build of Python compatible with your favorite > hardware. I think that it would not be necessary to start from the scratch. There are some free projects for interfacing PC to these cards like COMEDI http://www.comedi.org/. There are also projects with real-time adaptations of commong operating systems, for Linux, I know of two: RTAI https://www.rtai.org/ and RTLinux-GPL http://www.rtlinux-gpl.org/. I am not an expert in these domains but it appears that there should be no problems to interface to these tools. The only think is the investment of developers effort, of course...:-) Best regards, Zdenek _______________________________________________ Numpy-discussion mailing list Numpy-discussion@scipy.org http://projects.scipy.org/mailman/listinfo/numpy-discussion
