Control.com - Nerds in Control

My name is Jacob, and this summer I started writing a program for simulating control systems, very much similar to Simulink, in fact thats where I got the idea. It's nothing fancy, but it's a start and the program renders graphs that look ok. I'm developing in Linux, the GUI is written in Python+PyGTK, all heavy math calculations are done in a C library. If anyone would be interested in joining this project, I'd be glad to welcome you. The program, once released, will be covered by the GPL or LGPL, but I'm no software license expert.

Screenshot:
http://www.spacecentre.se/jacob/temp/camel.png

I don't have a TODO list for the app, but my goal is to actually hook up an engine of some sort to my computer, and be able to control it from the app.

So if you're interested drop me an email!

Regards Jacob Kroon
Email : jacob.kroon at gmail.com
Control student at "Lunds Tekniska Högskola", Sweden

Very interesting project. Good luck to go on... It needs lot of courage to develop/maintain a project during years(?)

Perhaps your help message will be heard. But often, it is easier to have users/bug reporters/little patchers, than to find a partner for a such project, but who knows...
Go on!

You're doing a good work, but have you ever seen scicos project from scilab group?

URL: http://www.scicos.org/

So, I think that's the same thing you're tring to do but as a way to learn your initiative is very good.

Good luck.

Hello,
One should perhaps note that scicos and scilab are not Free / Open Source. In particular, clause 4(c) of their license contains a prohibition on commercial use of derived works, which can be a serious hindrance for professional use.

Jiri
--
Jiri Baum <jiri@baum.com.au> http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jirib
MAT LinuxPLC project --- http://mat.sf.net --- Machine Automation Tools

Hi Jiri,

The Scicos/Scilab project indeed seems to be quite similar to what I want to achieve with my project, but you're right, the license they have chosen would seem a little restrictive. Also, I think how diagrams are displayed is a very important detail when it comes to user-friendlyness, they are using a very old windowing toolkit as a user interface, from what I can tell of the screenshots.

Matlab/Simulink suffers from the same problems, but they are indeed fully working applications, I just thought it would be a fun project, and good way of learning how control/signal processing work "inside".

Thanks for the feedback

Regards Jacob

P.S. For anyone interested, I have put up the source code for Camel here:

http://www.spacecentre.se/jacob/git/camel.git/

You need the "cogito/git" program to grab the sources

DS

Would you be able to put up a tarball of a snapshot? I haven't used git before, and when I followed your URL, I got an access error from the web server. Also, what library version requirements (GKT, etc.) are there? I would like to have a look at what you have.

Hi Michael,
Tarball is now available here:

http://www.spacecentre.se/jacob/temp/camel-0.2.0.tar.gz

Running the application might cause some problems though, as it depends on latest versions of Gtk (2.8) and PyCairo.

Regards Jacob

Moin Jacob,
moin all,

Matlab has Simulink but for Octave there is nothing similar (as far as I know.) IMHO, your software will be most useful if it is compatible with Octave.

Friedrich Haase

Ing.-Büro Dr. Friedrich Haase
Consulting - Automatisierungstechnik
email Friedrich@61131.com
WEB http://www.61131.com