Free mechatronics software for engineers and students

For students of mechanical engineering and electronics engineering, appreciating one another's disciplines can be a real issue, especially when these people enter real engineering companies, where cross-discipline projects are becoming the norm. But new software has been developed which may actually help solve these problems. Peter Long, head of Cambridge University's Department of Engineering told Eureka that he has been working on a suite of software, which he refers to as the Multi-disciplinary Design Project or MDP which is almost ready for distribution. "We want students that leave engineering courses to appreciate the mechanical, software and electronics aspects of design projects. Mechatronics projects if you will." The MDP Resource CD is being developed as part of a Cambridge-MIT Instititute-funded project which has been running since 2000. The CD is free of charge to students (and engineers in industry) and is being distributed as part of a trial. The CD itself includes a suite of common engineering software tools and resources using the 'Knoppix' (open source software based on Linux) bootable CD operating system. Long explained: "In many cases, all you need to do to use the Resource CD is to re-start any standard PC with the MDP CD in the CD-ROM drive. The CD boots directly into the Knoppix operating system., but will not make any change to the computer's existing operating system." All applications run directly from the CD and it will not install any software or write any data to a user's hard disk unless explicitly instructed to do so. Since Knoppix is based on the Linux operating system, Long said it can run many useful and free tools available for Linux. Available programmes on the CD at present include Pro/Engineer, a 3D solid modeling package; Emacs, a fully-featured text editor; Octave, a free numerical computation language that is similar to Matlab; GCC, a compiler for C++; LaTeX, a high quality type setting language; Open Office, a word processor, spreadsheet, presentation and drawing suite; and Mozilla Firefox, a web browser. Long is currently trying to persuade other software suppliers to offer their packages on the CD. National Instruments' LabVIEW test and measurement software is one such tool, along with PTC's Windchill and ProjectLink software. Long said that he is also looking at including a 2D CAD package (QCAD), an electrical CAD product (Geda) and electronics simulation software (Spice). He also mentioned 'Maxima', a symbolic mathematics tool and 'Red', an online design library of engineering calculations, and Calculix, computational fluid dynamics (CFD) software. The software is initially being targeted at engineering Degree (and above) students at UK universities, but could equally appeal to engineers in industry. If anyone is interested in the CD, e-mail pjgl2@eng.cam.ac.uk Or use Eureka's online enquiry system.