Author Topic: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire  (Read 46509 times)

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Offline renatose

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Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« on: November 18, 2011, 03:15:06 pm »
This is a project created by wyldckat (aka Bruno Santos) with the aim of creating an application for calculators to aid engineering students on the subject of thermodynamics.
It has got a project website hosted in google code and presently all the software and documentation is in Portuguese.
This is a link to the project website. (This site is in Portuguese but google translates it like a charm...)

This software displays the values ​​for the tables of thermodynamics properties of:
  • Water
  • Ammonia
  • Refrigerants 22 and 134a
  • Propane
  • Chemical formulas, molar masses and massic R constants to these plus some other substances
  • Specific heats for common gases (Air, N2, O2, CO2, CO, H2)

Currently this is in stable stage release for the 68k calculators and I am, in collaboration with wyldckat, creating a nspire version in Lua initially in English and thinking on multi-language support for future steps.

I created this topic to encourage debate about this, to get to know who will use this and for questions from me (on the developer side) and from all of you.
So... What do you think about this?
« Last Edit: November 18, 2011, 04:28:38 pm by renatose »

Offline Jim Bauwens

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #1 on: November 29, 2011, 07:07:17 am »
Looks very nice!
I wonder if we somehow could work together, as I, Adriweb and some others are working on an EEPro clone for the nspire.
Maybe the projects could even be merged?

Offline renatose

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #2 on: November 29, 2011, 04:39:27 pm »
I think it would be awesome! I just have to talk with wyldckat about it, but it should be ok (maybe someday he creates an account in omnimaga).

Another program I am used to hear of is ME Pro (cuz I'm taking mechanical engineering) so it could be another interesting one to bring to the nspire...

Offline Nick

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #3 on: November 29, 2011, 04:44:37 pm »
if needed, i would love to help on the translation to dutch, this project could be very usefull!

Offline renatose

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #4 on: November 29, 2011, 06:03:12 pm »
By now I'm trying to focus on doing something useful more than translating something which does not do anything (yet). When we start to do the localization work I'll start recruiting people into it.

Offline Jim Bauwens

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #5 on: November 30, 2011, 04:05:38 am »
The EEPro clone will be very extensible, so adding Mechanics to it will be quite easy ;)

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LBjZiKBB3k_bAIDWjTVRH9zTrX5DUQZ6BOXLhKveqJk/edit?pli=1
This is the main idea document, for our ideas.

Anyway, real progress will only start in a couple days, as my exams will be finished :D

Offline wyldckat

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #6 on: November 30, 2011, 04:31:22 pm »
Greetings to all!

Since renatose already introduced me, I'll skip the introductions ;)

@jimbauwens: I've finished looking over EEPro's manual and by what I can figure out, the common denominators between EEPro and Asstermo are:
  • The need for detailed interaction with the user, not just a simple QA interface, nor RPG/game like interface (just clicking around).
  • EEPro it's very heavy on equation inputs; Asstermo only needs equations for the combustion part (about 10% of the code).
  • EEPro uses graphs for some simple finance issues; Asstermo uses this for psychrometrics (not psycho, psychro as in "cold measurement")
Other than that, Asstermo is very heavy on table lookup (60-70% of the program). I've never looked very well into MEPro, so I'm not sure of what it does.

So I propose that instead of merging both projects, we instead create a common project for creating the infrastructure/framework for the user interface, or even a fully working GUI framework. Associated with this can be the translation mechanisms as well, since it's directly related to the user interface.
This has been the one big detail that has always kept me away from the almighty-powerful TI-nSpire calculators: TI took away our beloved dialogs and menus...

Currently the tasks on Asstermo-D (the new variant of Asstermo for nSpire, where D is for Document) are split as follows:
  • Porting TI-Basic code from TI-89 to TI-nSpire - wyldckat
  • Lua based GUI for replicating an user interface similar to TI-89 and then interacting with the TI-Basic code - renatose
  • Simplified translation mechanism for extracting texts from Lua onto XML then back to translated Lua, using Qt Linguist for XML translation - base infrastructure by wyldckat for Lua->XML->Lua and all of the Lua code by renatose
The objective is to have the GUI in Lua and the legacy code in TI-Basic, in an attempt to save time in both coding and documentation! The translation mechanism is inspired and based on Qt's Linguist translation software (Qt is at its core an UI framework ;)), but since Qt is C++ and too complex for nSpire, therefore the need for writing an app to pre-process Lua to Qt Linguist compatible XML and post-process XML back to Lua.


So, what do you guys think? The other advantage of creating the GUI framework is that many other programs can take advantage of that framework and more contributions can flow into this common project and benefiting all projects which use it!

Best regards,
Bruno

Offline Jim Bauwens

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #7 on: November 30, 2011, 05:38:01 pm »
I'm already busy on a GUI framework for EEPro, nd its very modular (ment to be used for other projects too).
So you guys will be able to use this.


I'll reread your post tomorrow, got to sleep now :p

Offline Jim Bauwens

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #8 on: December 02, 2011, 05:11:36 am »
Here is the EEPro plan, as you can see its quite modular:

(https://github.com/adriweb/EEPro-for-Nspire for more info)

I'm busy on the gui library, and it will be very easy to simulate requests and dialog boxes from the 68k calculators :)
Its going to be as modular as possible so that it will work for a whole range of applications.
Also, you can see that we will work with a plugin like system. Each plugin will have access to the gui, data storage, equation and some other api's.

Offline renatose

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #9 on: December 02, 2011, 08:07:29 pm »
It sounds good to me to be using the same core as your EEPro, by now I am getting used with object-oriented programming and I'll be busy studying to my evaluation tests so I can only see/do something about this in a couple of weeks...

In the meanwhile wyldckat should say what he thinks about this.

And I think that is unanimous that we have no intention to merge projects but we could join efforts to work on some kind of SDK + API to ease the lua programming to the nspire in general which would help all of us.

Offline wyldckat

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Re: Thermodynamics Assistant for nspire
« Reply #10 on: December 17, 2011, 08:03:56 pm »
I'm sorry for taking so long to reply... things have been hectic on my side.

I suppose that the best thing is to help out with your EEPro clone on whichever possible and when the time seems right and/or if it makes sense, spin-off a GUI-LUA framework for nSpire so it'll be easier for both us and others to simply snatch the framework from the repo and start using it ;)