What is Reddit's opinion of Scilab?

From 3.5 billion Reddit comments

Just going to point out there is a free alternative to Matlab called Scilab. http://www.scilab.org/ A few things are different.

There is also a free electrical schematic and printed circuit board layout tool, made within CERN, called KiCAD ...

http://kicad-pcb.org/

And lastly, if you are looking for a free alternative to 2D AutoCad, Draftsight, made by Solidworks, is worth looking into. I had problems with the 2017 version last March or so, and went back to the 2015 one. They will ask for your email address and send emails trying to get you to upgrade to either the Pro version of Draftsight or Solidworks (which I have only seen once but appears to be a kick ass 3D CAD program, my company uses something else).

http://draftsight2017.com/

The advantage to each of these is if you work at a company that any of the above is but a small part of your job, will, no more complaining. You can also work at home, legally.

Check out Scilab: http://www.scilab.org/products/scilab/environment

You mentioned you will miss Simulink. Be sure to also check out the "graphical editor to design hybrid dynamical systems models" called Xcos, which is distributed with Scilab.

Scilab is free software.

> There is no substitute for Simulink however.

Scilab Xcos isn't perfect, but it's pretty darn good. If you're speaking about Simscape specifically, I haven't found a great FOSS solution for that.

<insert lecture about the importance of going to class in the first two weeks>

Okay now that we got that out of the way, you're correct that you need to be a paid researcher or something in science/engineering to get a license for your personal computer. I know because I just went through the process. It involves setting up your IP as a "workstation" and having physical access to an ethernet jack on the engineering subnet. Read: you need an actual office to be able to install and verify the license. So you're out of luck, but it may be worth the money to buy a license yourself. I believe you can get a discount if you get it through the bookstore, my guess is ~$80. Another alternative is to take a look at scilab, it is free/open source and has been explained to me as basically a wannabe MATLAB. I haven't tried it so I can't speak to that but it's worth looking in to. A third option is to check with the library if it's possible to VPN remote access to a school computer that has a licensed copy of MATLAB installed. I just started here so I have no idea if they can accommodate that but it was possible at my undergraduate school.

Edit: in the time it took me to type this someone commented with a link to remote access. OP go with that

Scilab did it for me when I didn't have access to MATLAB. I'm not sure if it performs all the advanced tasks cause I only needed some basic functions, like long matrix multiplications to save me some time. It's definitely worth a download though. http://www.scilab.org/

I used SciLab quite a bit, and though it's not compatible with matlab, it's more or less the same language and it has a decent number of toolboxes... You might want to check it out. (http://www.scilab.org/)

Also, I don't think they will make any homework/test assignments that will require matlab or be really hard to do in octave. And if they do, I hope we'll make some kind of group effort to share library code & develop our own toolboxes :)

We use Octave for image processing and Scilab for circuit design.

Octave is awesome! It's syntactically similar to Matlab, quite fast and a mature GNU project (developed since '88). Though not all packages have been ported as of yet, you can find alternative easily. Since 4.0 they have had their own GUI as well.

Our design labs love Scilab, so I guess that's pretty good as well, though I haven't touched it since college.

I question whether Matlab can be included in this, the key we were given at VT expired every year. So I got to use Matlab for the summer after I graduated, but then the key expired and Matlab wouldn't work anymore. Had to uninstall it, unfortunately. That being said, someone posted in a thread a while back about Scilab, which is supposedly a free software that is designed to basically be Matlab. Haven't tried it yet though, so I can't vouch for or against it.

On the free side of things there is also GNUoctave and SciLab

If you are willing to use python NumPy would probably fit the bill too. Enjoy!

Just for the record, there is an open source alternative to matlab:

http://www.scilab.org/en

Sure there is octave, but scilab is more a matlab like (although the gui is not as polished as matlab's)

I 2nd that, but only if you already know Python and need more flexibility than an integrated environment. Possibly Sage would be a better fit for someone that's comfortable with MATLAB/Mathematica:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sage_(mathematics_software)

However, Scilab has Xcos, which is a systems modeler and simulator, similar to MATLAB's Simulink:

http://www.scilab.org/products/xcos

For python I'm using Automate the Boring Stuff. It's a really great intro to programming in general, and it's free!

And if your license expires or you can't pay for MatLab any more there's an open source program that's similar called SciLab

Octave can do DSP with further information here. As far as a simulink replacement there is SciLab Xcos.

Going on a tangent, scilab is a cool free alternative to Matlab. Good if you want practice, it has the exact same notation for input, and does 99% of what most people use Matlab for.

> Si la triche prolifère, c'est peut être qu'il est temps de repenser les règles.

C'est une solution, si ça ne tire pas encore tout le monde vers le bas...

> Une calculatrice est un client plus qu'un terminal.

... ça n'a juste aucun sens.

> Ou alors plutôt que de priver, on explique comment utiliser. Visons les limites de leur capacité.

Mais ça ne sert à rien! Il serait plus intéressant que les élève apprenne à se servir d'un logiciel comme Scilab pour toutes les operations possibles de ces calculettes. (Scilab etant gratuit, lui, et est utilisé dans l'industrie.) Meilleur programmation, meilleur maths, et gratuit.

Along the lines of Octave, also check out INRIA's Scilab. It isn't as dedicated to strict MATLAB compatibility as Octave is, but it also feels more like a complete package in some ways.

(INRIA is the same organization that created OCaml, Coq, and Bigloo Scheme.)

honestly all I did was googe for "octave symbolic tutorial" and looked at whatever came up. AFAIK the octave symbolic is not as well developed as matlab, I reckon that perhaps scilab has a better symolic package since I heard it was based on maxima, but that is just and entirely different mathematical environment.

This is one of the instances where the differences between matlab and octave become apparent. I wish I could help you more but I am really short on time. gl.

>If you're doing any math work then Octave is a pretty decent MATLAB replacement.

Why Octave? SciLab is way ahead of it, it imports from MatLab, has toolboxes and stuff. Plus plotting is quite easy.

ScicosLab - http://www-scicos.inria.fr/downloads.html

Scilab - http://www.scilab.org/

Those are your options (they're basically the same, they forked a version ago). It's not Octave, but they are very similar to Matlab/Octave. I haven't used Matlab, so I don't know how similar or not scicos/xcos is to the matlab stuff.