as engineers we understand how modern software has expanded the horizons for
what we're able to accomplish from the old days of drafting boards and hand
calculations we now have advanced software that is capable of simulating
and solving increasingly complex engineering problems the problem is
these great pieces of software are also very expensive and for good reason but
there are a ton of great programs out there that can help us solve the same
engineering problems without the price tag when I say it without the price
segment completely free I'm not talking about student licenses or trials these
are completely free and open-source to download this is gonna be a great video
for engineers of all types especially if you're a hobbyist or tinkerer or an
independent inventor maybe you're somebody who has a side project or a
business you're trying to get off the ground but you don't have a ton of money
to invest in software I'm going to be covering a lot of different programs in
this one that could help you all of those projects I'll go over what each
program does some of the commercial software they replace and then I'll
share some of my thoughts along the way so with that let's dive it
first up we have everyone's favorite statistics we'll just get this one out
of the way the software I'll be covering here is our R is a programming language
and interface built for statistical computing and graphics what does that
mean? Well it's good at stats you know everyone's least favorite subject in
college. You can compare this to other programs like Minitab or spss only this
one's free the stock program is command-line based but there are a lot
of great plugins like R-Commander or R-Studio that give it a lot more
user-friendly front-end interface. One of my favorite things about R is that it's
open source so there are a lot of great developers out there that have made
packages for things like Six Sigma and quality control by the way it sorry
to you computer programmers out there I realized R as a programming language and
I'm talking about it like it's a statistical package. So keep that in mind
R is at its core a programming language it's a great language to learn if you
want to get into things like data analytics and even machine learning or
IIOT it's very scalable and powerful and many top companies use this language
either in their business or software. Facebook's data analytics team actually
uses a software to analyze data and create custom visualizations. Most
engineers learn about a program called MATLAB in college. it is one the most
common mathematical modeling and computing programs out there. One of the
best free alternatives I could find is a program called the Scilab. Scilab is open
sourced and developed for mathematical computing for engineering and science
applications it is a wide variety of mathematical functions and graphing
capabilities with it we were able to create mathematical models for
mechanical electrical fluid and data analysis applications when you download
scilab you also get the XCos module which is great for modeling dynamic
systems and controls for mechanical electrical and hydraulic systems. I admit
these types of programs are far outside of my area of expertise so I don't have
a ton of input to offer but from the built-in open source demonstrations it
really seems like this program is capable of a lot it even has a MATLAB to
Scilab translator that supposedly can convert MATLAB projects alright I think
that's enough for the heavy mathematical programs. Let's move on to the more fun
and interesting pieces of software analyst so stick with me things are
about to get even more interesting 2D CAD is a cornerstone for most
engineering disciplines although things have been making a heavy shift toward 3D
modeling and parametrics, 2D is still heavily used in industry today.
DraftSight is a great free 2d CAD package that was developed by Dassault Systems
the creator of SolidWorks which is a very popular 3d CAD program draft sight
heavily parallels AutoCAD which I think just about every engineer
used at some point it's very easy to use especially if you do have a 2d CAD
experience you can use command line inputs or any of the great
point-and-click commands that it offers another great thing is draft slate also
supports a wide range of 2d CAD file types including dxf and DWGs. All right,
onto 3d CAD there's a very cool program called FreeCAD which has a great range
of 3d modeling capabilities as well as some other common features like
detailing, FEA (or FEM) and CAM. since this is another one of those awesome
open-source programs you can also down the work benches for things like sheet
metal modeling and even CFD I'm still pretty new this program so I haven't
figured out all these features yet but I definitely plan on getting to know this
software better there are just so many cool things you can do with it my only
real complaint is the workflows and design paradigms aren't the most
intuitive the commercial programs like SolidWorks and the veteran are much
easier to use however the fact that free CAD is well free and has such a wide
variety of capabilities it easily makes up for this deeper learning curve it
just takes some getting used to now let's take a look at a program called
KiCAD this is one for the electrical and computer engineers out there
kicad is aneCAD or EDA software for printed circuit board design this could
be used as an alternative to a program called eagle it is completely
open-source and for not knowing much about PCBs or electronics I have to say
it's pretty easy to use it has an extensive library of standard electrical
components as well as the ability to design custom components to add to your
circuits you can create circuit schematics map out your connections and
bring that all together to create a completed PCB design which can even be
viewed in 3d kicad also has features to create build materials and Gerber files
for the actual manufacturer of the circuit board once you have design let's
take a look at some CFD or computational fluid dynamics software the cornerstone
an open-source CFD is going to be OpenFOAM which is a completely open source
numerical solver toolbox or library built in C++ this open source library
contains solvers and utilities built for simulating or solving various CFD
problems open form alone can be used for CFD analysis but the drawback is that as
all code base and needs to be executed from a Linux
without having a very good understanding of fluid dynamics theory and open for
them and C++ syntax you'll likely struggle to use this for solving
problems if you do go this route I recommend you look into a couple of
other programs to make things a little bit easier like G-Mesh for creating mesh
files and ParaView for visualizing the simulation for people looking for a more
intuitive interface like myself I think SimFlow has one of the best free options
the reason I like sim flow is that as desktop-based and offers a pretty
intuitive interface but yet has all the features and options you would have
needed for a variety of simulations at any complexity the only drawback is the
free license limits the number of mesh nodes to $100 in which can seriously
limit the simulation accuracy especially for more complex analyses another thing
worth mentioning is there our developers working on creating a CFD toolbox for
free CAD which I mentioned earlier that we use open phone this will be available
in versions 0.17 and later it's still in beta testing but I have had a chance to
play around with it and it looks pretty promising and let's wrap with a couple
different options for the programmers out there are those of you looking to
learn programming first I want to talk about VBA which stands for Visual Basic
for applications it is essentially a simplified version of the more powerful
and comprehensive Visual Basic the syntax is the same or similar in many
cases but the differences that VBA is contained and executed within existing
applications you can think of VBA as a way of automating existing programs like
Excel or any of the other office apps AutoCAD or SolidWorks in my opinion VBA
is one of the best starting points for anyone wanting to learn how to program I
say this because it is not only very easy to understand but because it is
very easy to dive in and start making useful code just as a disclaimer many
more advanced or professional programmers might disagree with me on
this for a few reasons one is since VBA is very simplified and easy to use it
allows for some flexibility and sloppiness in your coding practices it
is not hard to make some code that gets the outcomes you might be looking for
but that doesn't mean that you follow the best coding practices to arrive at
that end result I'm sure that's kind of the case with coding in general but it's
just something that I've noticed in myself as I started to dive in other
languages now just to be clear VBA isn't something you would download or buy or
anything like that as I said it is contained within any
applications in which it is integrated so it is not technically free but since
most engineers use or at least have access to office programs like Excel I
included on the list for anyone looking for a way to program with more extensive
languages and compile custom projects there's a great open source integrated
development environment for ide called eclipse an ide is essentially the
workspace to write and compile your code for creating applications executables
dll's etc eclipse is very commonly used for java app development but has the
capability to compile other common languages like C sharp C++ PHP Python
are the statistical language mentioned earlier and many more for engineers I
would recommend Python is a great language to learn it is very easy to
understand syntax is powerful and is great for engineering applications it
also has great numerical solver libraries like numpy for mathematical
modeling and data science applications hey you made it to the end one last
thing before you leave leave me a comment down below and let me know if
you plan on adding any of these programs to your engineering toolbox and also be
sure to share this video with all your engineering friends so they can check
out these programs as well and be sure to subscribe so you can get my weekly
videos as we released also I just want to let you know that I really enjoy
making this video I learned a ton by making it because I didn't know half
these programs existed and I've never done anything with like CFD or I need a
circuit board design stuff so that was all great I learned a ton by making this
video so I really hope you enjoyed it also remember that this channel is for
you so if you have any suggestions for topics you want me to cover be sure to
leave me a comment and let me know that as well I'd be happy to cover anything
or research anything that you guys want to see and kind of break things down
into a useful video hopefully so yeah make sure to LIKE share subscribe and
we'll see you in the next video
you