Blockpad 4

[phamENG]

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?

Blockpad

 

[phamENG]

$38 / month

Worth noting they reduce the price for additional licenses. The $47/ month I quoted was for the smallest group (and therefore highest price).

I'm happy to pay a fair price for software, but when Enercalc is $65/seat and I don't have to invest the time to make the calculations myself, it's hard to justify spending even half of that on a calculation builder that requires significantly more investment on part. .

 

[271828]

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.

There is a lot of good to say about Excel. In about 2017, I moved away from Mathcad and started using Excel for most design tools and Octave for anything that needs a lot of calcs but not presentable output. I used Smath a little, but it was irritating and didn't catch on.

Excel works well for almost all of my calcs. If the sheet has plenty of notes about what equation is being used, a sketch here and there, and variables echoed down near where the calculations are, then those are clear IMO. I've submitted dozens of delegated calculation packages loaded full of these and have never heard anything negative about them. One of my pals uses Mathcad and I have a hard time following them. Not enough of the notes, etc. that I mentioned above.

There are just a few times when the calc is more ad hoc and a little harder, and I miss having Mathcad or Smath. I end up doing more of those manually than I would've before.

As for the current question, it's a tough call between Blockpad and Maple Flow. I'll bet Blockpad increases the price substantially as it catches on. Maple has been around forever and is very refined. The $900-something Blockpad price versus the $1495 Maple price is pretty aggressive of Blockpad IMO considering it still seems a little unrefined. Also, Maple has a world class calculation engine, FWIW. It's very over-powered for the kinds of work we do.

 

[Lomarandil]

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

Lex, you want to know about Standard Solver, which was developed by one of the users here (sorry, I could look it up) and is a web-based GUI for PyNite (by Craig Brink) and SectionProperties (by Robbie VanLeeuwen)(also active here). Very handy, I use it for quick validations or when I'm doing pro-bono work and don't have access to a full FEA license.

It's a different tool than Blockpad/MathCAD/Smath (forgive the tangent), but I think you'll like it

 

[Celt83]

Lo:

I don't believe the standard solver dev is a member here but the PyNite developer is. FYI I recall reading that the 3D analysis option on standard solver is planned to move to a paid tier.
PyNite Github page: [URL unfurl="true"]https://github.com/JWock82/PyNite[/url]
Standard Solver: [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.standardsolver.com/[/url]
Robbie's Section Properties Github Page: [URL unfurl="true"]https://github.com/robbievanleeuwen/section-properties[/url]

 

[Celt83]

For Frame Programs with Graphical Interfaces there is MASTAN2 and Edubeam:
Edubeam: [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.oofem.org/wiki/doku.php?id=edubeam:edubeam_en[/url]
MASTAN2: [URL unfurl="true"]https://www.mastan2.com/download.html[/url]

 

[SE2607]

I downloaded and briefly tested Blockpad. I thought it was very nice. It seemed to be a combination of Excel and MathCAD. When I realized it would take a substantial amount of time to learn it well enough to create productive templates, I decided it wasn't worth the time. My memory is fading, but I recall MathCAD's learning curve was very easy. Either I had more mental energy at the time, more time, or both. LOL. I loved MathCAD for it's ability to reduce equations to their simplest form. By hand, I would always make some mistake trying to take a shortcut. My best example was finding the maximum deflection of a beam with various loads. When MathCAD became incompatible with a particular Windows upgrade, I noticed the price of a MathCAD upgrade and said "no thank you". I also didn't like the appearance of a calculation sheet entirely in MathCAD. As the calculations got more complex, the calc sheet looked like a sheet of coding (if this, then that...). I eventually became 100% Excel and haven't looked back. Now I find the maximum deflection by dividing the beam into 100 sections (I know, 20 would be enough) and find delta max. Easy-peasy. I will always have Excel on my computer (now also on my tablet and phone) and no worries about upgrade. I just have the Office 365 subscription.

 

[lexpatrie]

Yeah, ALK I still have them. My instructor was Ted Galambos. I think i have the notes and the text we worked from downstairs.

 

[milkshakelake]

@KootK I remember your aspirations of turning the engineer software market on its head. I genuinely hope it becomes a reality.

@IDS I do use the VBA tricks for plotting, specifically the ones you linked. Thanks for your generous time and explaining it to the world. I stumbled upon it in like 2013 or 2014.

I hate to say it but Excel is looking better all of the time despite it's limitations for our work

I agree with this. I've tried a few different platforms and engineering libraries, but it never fits, or has long term issues with stability or pricing. My hat is off to Microsoft, because Excel was great 15 years ago and continues to be great. The few improvements it got are things I use constantly, like pen tablet integration. I definitely get frustrated using it almost daily, but I can almost always finagle a way to get the job done. I just wish it were more engineering-friendly, but the vast majority of its users are not engineers. The Python integration might help.

 

[SE2607]

My instructor was Ted Galambos

Wow!
I have a colleague who had Timoshinko as an instructor, but Ted Galambos is a pretty sweet for a reference.

 

[phamENG]

lex- where did you study? Dr. Galambos was my professor's Doctoral advisor at Washington University .

 

[lexpatrie]

Unless I find the old Excel/Quattro/VisiCalc versions of Enercalc, I'm not planning on using it ever again, unless I need to show how somebody did something wrong with one of their calculation modules.

I've seen too many people fail to read the manual when it comes to footings. Footings are particularly hard to fix once they've been cast and three stories of structure put on top of them. Why people don't just use CRSI for footings is beyond me. At least, not when they are standard designs that fit the conditions for the design.

 

[lexpatrie]

It was after Ted left St. Louis.

Looks like this was the text we used, ALK - same one you mention:

https://archive.org/details/Alexand...ucturalStabilityTheory1974/page/n135/mode/2up

 

[ALK2415]

@ lexpatrie, when you have the time, could you send it to myemail, will send you ours "old versions from Leeds Uni" with colorful examples

 

[TLHS]

My problem with Excel is that I don't do a lot of template calculations. I do a lot of one off sorts of things. It's really really bad for that because of the checking difficulty. If I moved away from smath or MathCAD I'd probably just be back to pencil on paper.

I am considering just rolling back my smath versions. I was pretty happy with where it was a year ago but it's scary to standardize on something that's not getting updates anymore and I'm only about a year into using it as my everyday tool so I'm not so invested in my existing infrastructure that it'd kill me to switch. I just don't really like any of the other options better. I'd honestly be happy paying a perpetual license fee to smath as well, it's just tricky knowing that the fee structure might be a moving target

 

[KootK]

Same. Were it available, I'd pay $5000 tomorrow for a perpetual MCAD license that entitled me to updates in perpetuity.

 

[Lomarandil]

Keep your updates, I just want the perpetual license. I don't really see SMath adding a lot of features that I would find widely useful, and I don't trust MathCAD's developers to add the features I want from SMath anytime soon.

 

[milkshakelake]

Bug fixes are okay, but major updates are not always good. When things are working, I like them to be the way they are. In my case:

-ETABS 2016 was the best version. Too many bugs introduced in the newer ones. Still have my maintenance plan, hopeful that they'll resolve it one day, but maybe I'm a sucker.
-Tedds 2022, 2023 concrete beam module is broken for certain loadings; older versions work. Cancelled my subscription after that.
-AutoCAD 2010-2013 were the best versions. Every update after that is bloated and slower. If it weren't vendor locked behind incompatible versioning, I'd still be using those.
-Quickbooks Desktop 2018 far outperforms 2021+ in a few metrics. It's nearly impossible to get that version (legally) now; I've looked far and wide.

 

[WinelandV]

Apparently, it's only $735/yr for MathCAD, which is $61.25/month (which probably explains SMath's price point).

Lo, what are the features that SMath has that MathCAD doesn't?

Please note that is a "v" (as in Violin) not a "y".

 

[Celt83]

Here are two small things from both Blockpad and MathCAD that to me reflect very poorly on their respective products and immediately injects doubt in forking money over to them:

MathCAD page with some links to "explore worksheet collections" right off the bat on my end some graphics fail to load on this page and the cookie acknowledgment popup at the bottom is actually blocked by the chatbot icon. Then going further if you click on Building Structural Design it takes you to a page that doesn't seem to have anything to do with premade Building Structural Design sheets.
Link
If a large company like this can't even get these basic web links right it does not give me any confidence to give them $$ for their software.

Blockpad I went browsing around their site after Pham mentioned it and immediately landed on blank pages. If you go to their Library page, Link, and click on beam analysis or spreadfooting they seem to just load empty pages (beam page - shows up blank for me). For me this is an immediate indication that things are half baked, whether they are or not, and make it hard to rationalize opening my wallet.

I'm guilty myself of plenty of half-baked ideas and tools on my own site and can honestly say some of those things are just not engaging enough for me to spend the time on and some other things are just too time consuming for me to address right now so they have been sitting on the back burner for a long time. Other things I know are not exactly hard to do properly because I've actually programmed them myself but just take some incredibly boring time to knock out so when those things aren't done by a big software company with teams of paid programmers it is an immediate red flag to me.

 

[phamENG]

Celt - I agree. I've been messing with Blockpad's web app and I'm not in love. A lot of stuff just doesn't work. Now, I'm still reserving judgement - I haven't signed up for the trial so I don't know if those are features reserved for paying customers or not. The lack of indication of that, though, is off putting.

I like it - it can do most of what I could do with SMath, and looks better. But if the trial with the desktop version is like the web app or they don't have good explanations and timelines, I'll probably pass.