All, I am conducting a survey and your response would be very much appreciated. The purpose of the survey is to gather data that will help the developers of open source software improve the success of their projects. All replies received before midnight Sunday 26th September will be entered into a draw for a £30 Amazon gift voucher. Here is a link to the survey: Click here to take survey Thanks for your participation! Lee Margetts

Folks,

I'm embarking on a project to build a modified copy of a DIY 3D printer.  See http://reprap.org/wiki/WebHome to get a rough idea.  In my case, I have my own lathe and milling machine, so I can fabricate more substantial components, e.g., by machining aluminum.  I also have larger stepper motors, some 3/8" precision rod and linear bearings that I can use. 

 The goal is to design a 3D gantry that will sweep roughly an 8" cube and mount alternate tool heads, e.g., a lightweight  plastic extruder, as well as heavier and higher vibration machining heads (~Dremel motor).  I would like to design the gantry to minimize static and vibrational deflection, while minimizing weight.

Summary:

I am thinking of informally conducting a specific case-study concerning the FEA solvers. The reference problem is a very simple but typical problem from stress analysis, leading of course to the linear systems: Ax = b and Ax = Lx.

I seek advice as to what software libraries currently available in the public domain would be best to use---the ones that would be fastest in terms of execution time for the reference problem.

I have a personal and longer-term research interest with certain issues related to the solvers technologies.

Suggestions and comments are welcome!

(1.) The Reference Problem:

I will be setting up an open source project for parallel finite element analysis in the next month or two. I am just wondering what the community's opinion is regarding the best repository to use.

SourceForge? Google Software? Others?

Your opinions are welcome.

A new AP article appeared today on  free access to college's educational materials, particularly spot-lighting the MIT Open Course Ware initiative.   Also discussed are available educational materials through iTunes and Youtube.   iMechanica has also got a growing repository of course notes on mechanics topics. 

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• This page was started following discussions initiated by Mogadalai Gururajan.

     Here are some links to open source codes/software available on the net; all this information is collected from different posts at iMechanica. It is quite possible that we missed some, and some that are listed are not open source. If so, please feel free to edit the post or leave a comment with relevant links so that we can edit the post.

Update: An Open Source Review page has been created. Please feel free to leave links, codes and comments on the page. 

Dear Mechanicians,

I have seen that there is lot of code sharing among the mechanicians at iMechanica; a search for the word "code" for example produces nearly fifty entries, of which, I believe, at least half of the posts are pointers to codes and their sharing.

Modelling and simulation is sometimes said to be the third way of doing science, the first two being theory and experiment; see this essay in Science for example: