Third day of the Masters’08 and I discovered another little treasure.
If you have been dreaming about using a tool like MATLAB to model your applications and to generate automatically your control algorithms, but you did not have the kind of money required to purchase the tool, here is an interesting Open Source alternative called Scilab:
But wait there is more, much more. The guys from Evidence s.r.l. have actually combined the Scilab tool with a vast library of modules for the dsPIC and PIC24 so that you can generate an entire advanced control application simply by dragging and dropping graphic icons on your PC screen, it’s called SciCOS. To complete the picture they have created a line of modular components (that somewhat reminded me of the PC104 standard) called FLEX. Useless to say that all FLEX boards/components have a corresponding model in Scilab and integrate perfectly in your control solution.
I have seen some pretty impressive real time demos, check them out!