Which: Matlab, Mathematica, Mathcad

That's a hell of an attitude!

John

Well, the starship guys can afford it.

John

The American WAY!

...Jim Thompson

-- | James E.Thompson, P.E. | mens | | Analog Innovations, Inc. | et | | Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC's and Discrete Systems | manus | | Phoenix, Arizona Voice:(480)460-2350 | | | E-mail Address at Website Fax:(480)460-2142 | Brass Rat | |

| 1962 | I love to cook with wine. Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Hi Joel: I used Maple probably 5-7 years ago...at that time, Mathematica was much better...but a lot has changed. John

Joel Kolstad wrote:

On Tue, 07 Jun 2005 18:44:16 -0700, Jim Thompson wroth:

I would look at the possibility of getting new clients. Those formats you reported the present ones using lead me to believe they are too stupid or lazy to present you with proper data.

If it won't fit an Excel spreadsheet, it ain't real data.

Jim "the other one" Meyer

Mathcad is a wonderful program. Very easy and intuitive to set up live formulas and solve blocks that look like a technical report. Very handy when you go back to something six months (or years) later. Strongly recommended for numerical applications and it also includes some symbolic capability.

That said, IMHO they totally screwed the individual purchaser [*] with their current system-locked licensing scheme. Versions from 11 and later require the dreaded "product activation" where you send them a hardware identifier and they send you an activation key.

I've owned and upgraded a personal copy of Mathcad since the days when it ran on DOS with a Hercules graphics card and I'll stick with my version 2001i, thank you very much, that only requires CD-keyed validation after installation.

[*] The enterprise versions don't require product activation but they're insanely priced.

--
Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA

Hello Jim (both),

Yes, it is amazing what you can do with Excel or MS-Works. I have even done pretty complicated beam profile studies for ultrasound transducers with these rather mundane pieces of software. They don't allow fancy formulas but you can nest stuff to your heart's desire. So far I have never hit a hard limit where I would have to concede.

Then you may be forced to buy whatever software can read the files. It's the same as with schematic capture, nothing is compatible. Maybe the vendors just want it that way. EDIF? Forget it, I have never really seen compatibility and it may be the same with math packages.

Regards, Joerg

You BASTARD! Not even a smiley with that. Now I've got to clean the sprayed tea from the monitor and coax down a cat that hid on top of the curtains for safety after the "explosion."

--
Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA

?

Its the realistic one.

Kevin Aylward snipped-for-privacy@anasoft.co.uk

SuperSpice, a very affordable Mixed-Mode Windows Simulator with Schematic Capture, Waveform Display, FFT's and Filter Design.

Apologies to the cat.

John

Kevin, you are so restrained these days. Got better things to do, or just mellowing out?

Hi Mark, MatLab is what my client is pushing me to get. But an awful lot of money for so little usage, almost as expensive as a PSpice maintenance renewal :-(

...Jim Thompson

--
|  James E.Thompson, P.E.                           |    mens     |
|  Analog Innovations, Inc.                         |     et      |
|  Analog/Mixed-Signal ASIC\'s and Discrete Systems  |    manus    |
|  Phoenix, Arizona            Voice:(480)460-2350  |             |
|  E-mail Address at Website     Fax:(480)460-2142  |  Brass Rat  |
|       http://www.analog-innovations.com           |    1962     |
             
I love to cook with wine.      Sometimes I even put it in the food.

Terry,

I'm a little embarassed to admit it, but one of the reasons I upgraded to MathCAD 12 was due to their addition of dual axes on graphs... I always did miss that in MathCAD 2000!

The product activation feature is a PITA, however. The "major" new feature in MathCAD 12 -- using XML as the native file format -- is not something I particularly care about, but for those (seemingly rare) "enterprise users" I could see as being valuable.

MatLab release 14 has a lot of nice small additions from release 12 (I never had13), such as the ability to TRACE A GRAPH. This is a feature that I think every other major math package has had for at least 5 years if not a decade now, so it's good to see MatLab finally catching up. :-)

Ha ha... I did something similar (but simpler) than that... finding pairs of standard 5% value components to get as close as possible to an "ideal" value -- the idea being that the circuit needed tuning away, so why pay for 1% parts?

---Joel

This reminds me of when I tried to do a 4096 point "FFT" on an excel spreadsheet. This was excel from MS office 95. I was using the FFT package that came with excel. The documentation said that sizes over 4096 were not supported (very suspicious). So I tried doing a 4096 point FFT, and I had to go away for 10 minutes or so before it finished.

This was on a 200 MHz Pentium, IIRC, so there was no reason for it to take much more than a fraction of a second.

I'd bet dollars to doughnuts that it was NOT the FFT, but just a naive, slow, DFT.

I'm sure this problem has long since been fixed, but I haven't gone back to check on it.

--Mac

If your forced into MathCad, avoid version 12 like the plague. Version

12 is supposed to have a new core and they haven't fixed bugs and made it fully compatible with files created in previous versions. I think version 11 is the last best version except for the bloody license manager crap. Mathcad is easy to use and almost intuitive except for the GUI (editing). It is easy to crash without it doing any computations (based on versions 8 and earlier). Mathcad sucks if you need to do decision loops and branches.

The image processing guys at my former firm really like MatLab. A bit harder to learn, but much more capable.

--
Mark

They don't generally test and bin resistors, they trim each of them individually to very close to the correct value (typically within 1% for 5% parts, from those I've checked). With leaded parts there were vibratory feeding bowls and an instrument with thumbwheel switches that ended the "cutting" when the set value was reached. Before the leads and end caps were attached, IIRC. SMT parts use laser techniques, AFAUI.

But where could you find an actual 200ppm SMT resistor?

Mostly because the materials used in modern 5% chip resistors are as good as the semi-precision ones of which you speak.

And the semi-precision 1% parts may be unsuitable or marginal for use in precision circuits, so be careful of the specs. "1%" doesn't necessarily mean "precision" (stability, tempco etc.)

Best regards, Spehro Pefhany

--
"it\'s the network..."                          "The Journey is the reward"
speff@interlog.com             Info for manufacturers: http://www.trexon.com
Embedded software/hardware/analog  Info for designers:  http://www.speff.com

There are several programs in the "nearly Matlab compatible" group.

has brief reviews of some of the better known ones, along with benchmarks. Note that most (all?) of the applications have later versions than the ones reviewed but it provides a good snapshot of the state of the art as of late 2003.

O-Matrix (not free but not expensive) had better scores on some benchmarks in its "Matlab compatible mode" than Matlab itself had. Might be worth evaluating.

#disclaimer: I've purchased O-Matrix and also have Scilab and Octave but almost always reach for Mathcad first.

--
Rich Webb   Norfolk, VA

In sci.electronics.cad Jim Thompson wrote: : Hi Mark, MatLab is what my client is pushing me to get. But an awful : lot of money for so little usage, almost as expensive as a PSpice : maintenance renewal :-(

I second the motion to try Scilab:

I use it all the time. Open-source, freely available for download, both Linux and Windoze versions. . . why haven't you tried it out already?

As far as Matlab compatability: Scilab, Octave, et al. are based (somehow) upon Linpack, the linear algebra library originally written in Fortran. Therefore, the syntax for handling matricies and doing math is basically identical. However, each package has its own functions for plotting. Therefore, a graph-intensive program will require some translation. But if your clients are just doing math with MATLAB, then you won't need to do much work to translate their files.

Stuart

As has been observed, you may be stuck with proprietary data formats for each.

Can your client not arrange a 'site license' or similar for you ?

FWIW I've used Mathcad since its DOS days. Started on v 2 IIRC.

I've heard nice things about Matlab - mainly from educational sources.

Personally I find Mathcad a total breeze to use. I'm not solving anything too stunning though.

Graham