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phamENG

phamENG

Structural
Feb 6, 2015
7,272
In my quest to find a replacement for Smath, I came across this. Not free but looks promising and not that expensive. Anyone messed with it?

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@phamENG: I was going to disagree with you, but did some investigating. It appears that the price is "currency agnostic" $1495 CAD if you are buying from Canada or $1495 USD if you are buying from the States (taxes etc. calculated and checkout). This is arguably pretty hilarious...

Screenshot_2023-12-13_103136_s4fvqg.png
Screenshot_2023-12-13_103434_dgphxi.png
 
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I wonder what their program would do if you put in pound-mass vs pound-force. It might be agnostic on that too. LOL
 
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At some point, you got to wonder how many times are we expected to build up our calculation libraries with one software and then build it up again with another once the technology gets stale or changes it's business model? These programs are *nearly* mandatory nowadays with the regulations for checking and documentation. Moreover, these programs are a necessity if you want to be competitive and compliant; hand calculations are fine until the arthritis kicks in.

These threads are always interesting to read because it really shows that there is a demand for this technology and also that engineers seem fundamentally annoyed with what is out there in terms of price and performance. More and more I'm leaning toward open source coding platforms, but the convenience of a simple paperlike interface with a math engine and unit tracking is unmatched.
 
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I agree, skeletron. I'd much rather make my own tools with reliable, long standing tech. BUT...the only people with the time and resources to do that seem to be those who make these new tools for sale that we constantly complain about price and performance for...

I've more or less resigned myself to having to pay for these tools.
 
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Celt83 or some smart coding engineer needs to start a company and fix every engineering software issue we've been complaining about, once and for all, and buy a yacht from the proceeds. It's probably harder than it sounds. But then again, I'm not a programmer and yet I'm coding my own tools out of necessity.
 
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milkshakelake said:
...needs to start a company and fix every engineering software issue we've been complaining about
Click to expand...
I don't use any of the calc. pad software discussed here, but I'm curious what the issues are with them. Reading through the responses above, it sounds like there are already several great programs available with the only issue being the price.
 
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@Eng16080 I meant more generally. There are lots of threads about how a software can't do a certain thing.
 
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Eng16080, this thread is part of a pretty long story. A few key parts:

Mathcad was a good option from about the turn of the century to roughly 2015 when the program was bought by another company. They went to a subscription based model, which is unpopular as far as I can tell. I tried the new version recently after being away a few years and it was irritating at best. Based on comments by people who have been using it, it's worse than what we had a decade ago.

Smath became popular a few years ago. It's a pretty good knock-off of Mathcad, and it was free, so people flocked to it. It is by a Russian programmer, who might be an awesome guy for all I know. When the geopolitical situation worsened, some people became hesitant to use it. Recently they started charging a subscription also, and a lot of people started looking for options.

Most of the other programs, like Octave, are more like old-school programming languages simplified for engineers. There's a lot of coding and the input and output are not visual at all.

The users invest a crapload of development time on their tools, so when they need to ditch a platform for whatever reason, it's a pretty big blow. After getting burned a couple of times, people are becoming more vigilant and asking a lot more questions before committing. LOL
 
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"PTC claims" LOL!!!!!! I gave up on MathCAD 15+ years ago; each new version seemed to crash more often than the previous version, and there were incompatibilities between versions so something I recall; and had to keep buying new versions with each new Windows version upgrade.
 
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271828, thanks for the summary! I can vaguely remember using Mathcad back in college. I thought it was great tool at the time, but never used it beyond school, mostly because the company I went to didn't. They relied primarily on excel spreadsheets and a few software packages.

A long time ago, I wrote a small piece of software in python to provide math operations for numbers with units. Probably something like a very, very basic version of Octave (based on your description). It worked well for my limited needs at the time.

I think it's unlikely that you'll find a great Smath (or whatever) alternative which also happens to be cheap/free. Your best bet might be to look for an open source project. This type of stuff usually ends up being a trade-off between how user friendly it is and the cost. Occasionally there will be something awesome and free, but once it starts to get a following, it's usually not long before the developers realize they can actually make money off it.
 
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milkshakelake said:
The Newton Excel Bach person (forgot the username) disagreed with me in the past and said it's very doable, but it's just my own lack of experience and skills; the learning curve is quite high.
Click to expand...

I forget the context of the previous discussion, but these days I'd say doing dimensioned graphics in Excel was both clunky and doable. For instance, I quite often mark up a drawing provided as a pdf by copying and pasting to Excel, then using the Excel drawing objects and finally either print or save as pddf. Alternatively doing a scaled drawing from coordinates with VBA is not too bad (see
For calculations involving optimisation, interpolation, solving text equations, etc, it seems to me that linking Excel to Python and Scipy/Numpy is a good option which deserves more attention.

Coincidentally, I have just published my library of python functions linking Excel to Scipy using pyxll. See:

Note that pyxll is a commercial subscription based package (US$299/year), although I really don't see why so many people see that as an issue for an application used on a daily basis in a commercial context.

Doug Jenkins
Interactive Design Services
 
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phamENG said:
Because the $47/ month price tag was enough to get me shopping around.
Click to expand...

Ugh... this is the first that I've heard of this. I was all for them monetizing but they've overshot it by a large margin. I feel as though $50USD/yr would have been about the sweet spot.

A popular, loooong standing free calculator (2009) for Canadian engineers recently went subscription: Jabacus. I don't blame them, of course, but seeing them monetize pretty much killed off any hope that I was harboring for anything staying perma-free.

I hate to say it but Excel is looking better all of the time despite it's limitations for our work. Like skeletron said, retooling the library endlessly isn't much fun.

 
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User friendliness is the key factor for me. I'm all for building my skill sets to dabble in some calcs in Python or Octave or whatever. But I'll eat my hat when I can get the other engineers to make that same investment in a way that lets us use the tools collaboratively.
 
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I like MathCAD (Yes, even Prime), as it does what we need it to: create a sharp looking set of calculations. We don't use any of the advanced functions - matrices are about as deep as we need to go. The subscription price isn't great, but we make do sharing 1 license among the 3 of us. One uncommon, but VERY annoying thing: occasionally, the network license won't check itself back in properly, which means that none of us can use it without the "CREATED IN MATHCAD EXPRESS" watermark across the page. Not great when you need to print out some calcs.

Please note that is a "v" (as in Violin) not a "y".
 
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MSL said:
Celt83 or some smart coding engineer needs to start a company and fix every engineering software issue we've been complaining about, once and for all, and buy a yacht from the proceeds. It's probably harder than it sounds.
Click to expand...

I shall seize upon that comment to plug a thread that I started a while back on that very topic. Celt and others are crushing it with respect to the development of online tools. But, to my knowledge, their fine work has garnered little traction. I've come to the conclusion that no single actor will be able to get anywhere with web tools on their own.

Behold! The power of free market incentive structures to provide stuff for folks who want stuff. Engineering software has become monopolized to a significant extent in my opinion. That, because the investment required to produce monetizable software it very large now. We gotta break that up a bit like we did with the railroad barons of old.

How to Support Our Smalltime Software Developers - THE KOOTMARKET
 
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On a related note, does anybody remember that circa pets.com there was an online web site that did shear and moment envelopes for steel joists with various loads? I thought it was an N. J. Bouras tool? This was web based, not the MS-DOS thing that Vulcraft had for a while.

I'd also mention the Alex Tomanovich series of spreadsheets that circulated on steel-tools and a few other websites, some more general (wind loading) others more steel focused, but a large set of spreadsheets.
The "problem" with all these idealistic one guy startups is that they are either way too specific to odd situations, or there's zero visibility (so nobody knows about it), and usually it's in something obscure like Perl or Python. And it never builds on something or expands an existing toolset and it doesn't connect or interact. Everybody keeps inventing the wheel in a new programming language, etc.

I've looked at OpenSEES but it's not anywhere near what I actually could use (I don't need multistory seismic load-step or whatnot, talking straight linear elastic analysis, mostly wood-frame, member selection and load inputs. BASIC.) And the user input feels very much like Staad 2000. Like it's almost punch card level.

As a result, I build my own, keep them on my local personal computer up to date, and if they wander off, they are eventually out of date and poorly documented anyway, with no support. Somebody wants to use a stolen tool with no documentation, that's on their ethics and liability. I forget if I use Excel 2010 or 2000. I think it's 2010. Got a copy for $40 with Office through an employer some time ago.

I don't do anything too fancy with it, It's advanced to the point that others can't readily penetrate the logic (being a sole proprietor this is not a concern), but it does have a flow, and the calculation set is reasonably complete. I had some really cool automation working for about five minutes, sending data and retrieving answers from USGS, ATcouncil, etc, for loads, and then everybody changed their website. But it did work for a while, all from an Excel Macro.

There are still bells and whistles I'd like to add, and I maintain a change log so I know where it was used if I find an error I can track it backwards to check any designs I used it on, but it is serviceable. It's very text based and you have to know where the inputs are, but it works for me because I built it and I know how it works, and all the guts are on display, so when things go haywire it's a breadboard and I can figure it out. It's a monster, however, as I put in a ton of images and Excel stores them terribly. So when I open it (which is rarely nowadays as I do mostly non-design work), the computer fan spins up like it's getting ready to launch off an aircraft carrier.

I remember using MathCAD and liked it, but when you use it for stability calculations (this was Grad school) at the time you had to manually iterate. Disliked. Not relevant anymore, either.

I will take a look at the Bach website, maybe making an interactive drawing would be a fun thing to learn.
 
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I am very disheartened I am to see the pricing on Smath. I have been a huge fan of the software and contributed to them over the years.

But.......$38 / month is too much. I work for a medium size engineering firm and there is a small group of loyal users in my office. We won't have much luck trying to convince our IT department that we need another multi-thousand dollar software package.
 
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@ lexpatrie do you still have your "stability lectures" around ?
I straggled in teaching this material using Horne, W. Merchant & Alexande chajes
 
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