Re: Who uses Octave?

[Chipmuenk]

I'm a teacher for Electrical Engineering at the Munich University of Applied
Sciences and I use 
Octave (3.2.4 + GUI Octave) from time to time on my private laptop for some
digital filter design 
and simulations and to create illustrations for my presentation slides. The
capabilities of 
Octave are more than sufficient for most EE courses and I would like to use
Octave instead of ML 
in my courses "Digital Signal Processing on FPGAs" and "Analog Circuit
Design", but currently 
some issues keep me from doing this on a larger scale:

- First and foremost: No proper GUI - my students are not willing to use the
software mainly due 
to this reason, they rather get a cracked ML version instead (which I
disapprove of!). 
- No fixpoint package, I've written some simple (and slow!) functions to get
around this, but I 
think it is a pity that the "fixed" package seems to be dead
- A Filter GUI like "Filter Design and Analysis" in ML is essential for
teaching the basics of 
DSP. I could help to create such a GUI, also with fixpoint / quantized
arithmetic, but I'm not 
sure about the state of Zenity or some other (?) GUI package and how it fits
with the ongoing 
changes of the graphical backend. And I'm not a C / C++ programmer.
- Highlevel FPGA design tools are only available for ML / SL. I have some
ideas how to get around 
this with a "poor mans design flow" but before I dive into this I would like
to understand what 
will likely happen (and when!) with the other issues
- Hardware I/O: I'm not sure how easy it it to talk to simple analog and
digital I/O cards but 
haven't heard a lot of success stories yet. The main OS of my students is
Windows, other OS are < 
10% I would guess.

I have also tried to promote Octave to my colleagues but they stick to ML
(in spite of licence 
fees that we are not happy with at all) for similar reasons as stated above.
So, unfortunately, 
Octave currently is only a "backup solution" at our university. 

While this is not strictly a reply to "who uses octave" but more to "who
would like to use octave", maybe it helps to explain why Octave is not as
common among EE students as it seems to be among other faculties.

Best regards,

Christian Münker 



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