Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

piege · 2008-08-04 15:23:39

Hey,

I was wondering what software people in engineering (especially electrical) were using?

I seem to be using a lot of latex which is a wonder for technical papers.

Appart from that i'm pretty much a noob.

ornitorrincos · 2008-08-04 15:30:15

depends in what are you looking for, for circuits I uso windows software(they ask me to use them and I don't really now any oss or crossplattform alternatives)

catwell · 2008-08-04 15:59:48

For microcircuit design (FPGA and such), Xilinx's toolkit is available for Linux (but not free-as-in-free-speech).
Other than that, I'm still a student and more in the communications / computing field, but I usually don't write Latex since I don't like it (what an horrible syntax). For reports, I use markdown and generate the corresponding lout or Latex code with pandoc.

What I really miss is a good text-based slides generator for presentations. I've tried beamer, pythonpoint and magicpoint but I haven't found what I need. So, I'm stuck with OpenOffice for that.

Other than that, I'd say the tools I use most are claws-mail and vi

Last edited by catwell (2008-08-04 16:03:35)

ornitorrincos · 2008-08-04 16:12:14

For microcircuit design (FPGA and such), Xilinx's toolkit is available for Linux (but not free-as-in-free-speech).

ah, true, I forgot Xilinx

Berticus · 2008-08-04 17:07:08

I'm an electrical engineering student (entering junior year). Last year I learnt about LaTeX and wrote all of my papers with that.

Last year I used spice3f4 (from U.C. Berkeley) to do a circuit analysis project (NI Workbench gave me the wrong output). With the guide of a LinuxJournal article I was able to use spice and nutmeg to do my project in Gentoo Linux.

Now that I'm in Arch Linux, I've installed ngspice/ngnutmeg (open source version of spice3f5). I currently don't have anything to generate a picture of the schematic from my netlist files I use with ngspice. So finding something that can do that would be nice. Otherwise I simply use Gimp to draw my schematics (learning how to do it in LaTeX). Maybe I'll write a simple program that will be able to do that.

---Edit---
You may want to have a look at http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/8438

Last edited by Berticus (2008-08-04 17:16:40)

heleos · 2008-08-04 18:52:40

I got hired as an electrical engineer, and since I work for a large company, we use Microsoft.

I spend most of my time in excel/autocad!

jb · 2008-08-05 02:53:48

I used Quartus II quite a bit. But I had to wine the windows client (web-edition) because the linux version was something in the neighborhood of $3000USD.

Last edited by jb (2008-08-05 02:54:12)

samwise · 2008-08-05 04:31:26

I'm also an undergrad electrical engineering student.
ngspice is great for simluation, but I haven't found a gui frontend I really like yet. You could try Gschem which is part of GEDA. GEDA is a bunch of electronics design programs bundled together - some are ok, some less so. Gtkwave is one of the better ones.

I looked really really hard for a good oss VHDL simlator, and the best I found was GHDL, but it's dependent on a particular gcc version (it's a gcc frontend) and is really annoying to install.

Also, I use Octave as a Matlab replacement, and Maxima as a Maple/Mathematica replacement. They're not as fully featured as the proprietary ones, but they do the job and as a student I'm damned if I'm gunna pay $AU 100+ for software.

I've also used Xilinx on Windows in the labs, however this semester we moved up in the world and get to use Red Hat/GNU toolchain to cross compile for ARM embedded boards :-)

edit: the GEDA link url was wrong

Last edited by samwise (2008-08-05 04:32:28)

piotroxp · 2008-08-05 11:20:37

noob question:

whats so cool about latex?
It seems its something like html with css ...

piege · 2008-08-05 12:47:05

to keep it simple here is what I think makes latex some worth the effort.

- Automatic formating so you can actually concentrate on the content and your format is always consistent
- you can also include programming style formatting for example of codes which looks very professionnal
- You don't have to point and click every symbol of a mathematical expression most of them have functions related to them (which saves a lot of time for a student in engineering).
- The final results looks much more better and professionnal than a report written in word or Open Office

If you get a chance try it out I find it worth it.

Berticus · 2008-08-05 13:17:48

samwise wrote:

Also, I use Octave as a Matlab replacement, and Maxima as a Maple/Mathematica replacement. They're not as fully featured as the proprietary ones, but they do the job and as a student I'm damned if I'm gunna pay $AU 100+ for software.

Ever heard of a student license? I don't know about your university, but here proprietary software is usually in the neighborhood of $0-20 each. I got a 1 year license for Maple for something like $5 for both Linux and Windows, and I heard that 1 year license tend to last longer than a year. Latest MS Office is always free here. Vista is like $15, although I don't have it installed for driver reasons. I think Matlab is around $15.

In any event, I would urge you to check out Sage as full replacement for Matlab, Maple and Mathematica. It's gaining grounds in the Mathematics industry, and I think eventually it will be accepted in the Engineering industry. Another good thing about sage is that it's Python-based. The thing I don't like about Maple and Matlab is how aweful the languages are.

piege · 2008-08-05 13:22:39

is there a pkgbuild for sage ?

edit: doing a little search in the AUR I found this! http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=14429
and this http://aur.archlinux.org/packages.php?ID=15854

Going to try it out as soon as possible!

I always though python would make a wonderfull alternative to the ugly matlab code.

Thanks a lot

Last edited by piege (2008-08-05 13:28:34)

SiB · 2008-08-06 01:17:23

I personally used Electric (written in Java) for some processors simulations in a computer engineering course. I don't know if it's any good for EE students.

Last edited by SiB (2008-08-06 01:17:39)

samwise · 2008-08-13 11:13:02

Berticus wrote:

samwise wrote:
Also, I use Octave as a Matlab replacement, and Maxima as a Maple/Mathematica replacement. They're not as fully featured as the proprietary ones, but they do the job and as a student I'm damned if I'm gunna pay $AU 100+ for software.
Ever heard of a student license? I don't know about your university, but here proprietary software is usually in the neighborhood of $0-20 each. I got a 1 year license for Maple for something like $5 for both Linux and Windows, and I heard that 1 year license tend to last longer than a year. Latest MS Office is always free here. Vista is like $15, although I don't have it installed for driver reasons. I think Matlab is around $15.

Lucky. Bearing in mind this is Australia, prices in the UNSW bookstore for boxed sets are:
Matlab & Simulink Student 2007a: $AU 117
Maple 12 Student: $AU 199
Mathematica 6 Student $AU 239
MS Office Home/Student $AU 199
MS Vista home premium was also ~$120

To be fair, you can borrow Matlab cds from the EE school office, but they only had 32 bit editions last time I checked and I run Arch64.

Berticus wrote:

In any event, I would urge you to check out Sage as full replacement for Matlab, Maple and Mathematica. It's gaining grounds in the Mathematics industry, and I think eventually it will be accepted in the Engineering industry. Another good thing about sage is that it's Python-based. The thing I don't like about Maple and Matlab is how aweful the languages are.

I agree Maple is horrible, but for me Matlab is tolerable. I did try Sage, it seems really promising but it was huge (like 250mb?) and not very easy to use, even though it does use python. I will keep an eye on it though.

Decapsuleur · 2008-08-13 12:31:53

SiB wrote:

I personally used Electric (written in Java) for some processors simulations in a computer engineering course. I don't know if it's any good for EE students.

Ahh... Electric... still giving me nightmares !
Never really took the time to learn to use it though.

Berticus · 2008-08-13 12:53:46

samwise wrote:

I agree Maple is horrible, but for me Matlab is tolerable. I did try Sage, it seems really promising but it was huge (like 250mb?) and not very easy to use, even though it does use python. I will keep an eye on it though

Matlab was larger from my recollection (>512MB?)

eldragon · 2009-04-01 21:18:20

for circuit / board design, i use eagle, which is free for small boards.

for simulation: im stuck with orcad + winxp + virtualbox. all the alternatives had many shortcomings...

Renan Birck · 2009-04-02 19:58:53

For simulation I use LTSpice under Wine. LT is freeware and is, IMHO, much better than OrCAD (which I use at university, and I hate).

Also I use Matlab, esp. for Simulink. I believe Scilab has a similar tool...

Arch Linux

#1 2008-08-04 15:23:39

Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#2 2008-08-04 15:30:15

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#3 2008-08-04 15:59:48

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#4 2008-08-04 16:12:14

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#5 2008-08-04 17:07:08

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#6 2008-08-04 18:52:40

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#7 2008-08-05 02:53:48

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#8 2008-08-05 04:31:26

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#9 2008-08-05 11:20:37

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#10 2008-08-05 12:47:05

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#11 2008-08-05 13:17:48

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#12 2008-08-05 13:22:39

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#13 2008-08-06 01:17:23

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#14 2008-08-13 11:13:02

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#15 2008-08-13 12:31:53

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#16 2008-08-13 12:53:46

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#17 2009-04-01 21:18:20

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

#18 2009-04-02 19:58:53

Re: Good softawre for student in electrical engineering

Board footer