Current project: Open source
development tools
Goal: The goal of this project is to
produce a set of development tools based completely on open-source
material capable of rapid engineering of robotics and other
applications.
Why?
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Cost: by the time you accumulate
all of your basic engineering tools you can easily spend in excess
of 30K per seat. Unless your independently wealthy, this isn't very
practical for the hobbies, student or new entrepreneur / small
business.
-
Planned Obsolescence:
Unfortunately, in order to stay in business a software company must
continue to sell software. Even if the software product is perfect,
if the software company doesn't continually produce new versions or
upgrades, they will go out of business. When you also consider the
fact that engineering software is a small market, the software
company must charge a premium for the product in order to stay in
business.
-
Draconian license policies:
Although this is number one on my list, I have to give the software
companies the benefit of the doubt. After all the primary business
of a software company is to make money from sales of their products
and if everyone is stealing their products they cant stay in
business. This leads to ridiculous and unfair usage rights along
with some really annoying software protection devices such as
dongles and on-line registration practices.
-
Rapid Development: This is
probably the most important reason for undertaking this project. If
your a professional engineer, your probably aware that most of the
“main stream”
engineering tools are geared more toward collaborative engineering
rather than rapid development. As a hobbyist or small business
owner, your team size is probably very small so its more important
to develop quickly.
OK, enough of the bla bla, lets build
your set of open source engineering tools that you OWN, you can copy
and distribute to your hearts content. If you don't like they way
they work, you can edit and re-compile and customize them.
Things you will need:
-
Access to a functioning computer
with an Internet connection and a CD ROM burner.
-
A blank CD
-
A computer that you will turn into
your engineering computer
The following is a list of functionality and applications that make up the Open Source tool kit.
Excited? Good.......
START HERE
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Application Function
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Open Source Replacement
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Operating system
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Ubuntu
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PC Software application development
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Lazarus
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Embedded Software Development
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SiLabs C8051Fxxxx 8bit MCU
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HTML / Web page development
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KompoZer
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Web design image tool
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KimageMapEditor
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FTP Client
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gFTP
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Office Tools
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OpenOffice
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Electrical Engineering
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KiCad
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Virtual Machine
(not installed by opensourceinstall.sh)
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Virtual Box
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Mechanical Engineering
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???
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Mathematics
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SciLab
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Unit Conversion
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Josh Madison's Unit Converter
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Windows Emulator
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WINE
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Flash Media Player
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Flash
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Source Control / Vault
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SVN, SVN Workbench
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Bug Tracking
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Mantis
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Web Server
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Apache
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