News for hackers. Stuff that matters.
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by captainmuon on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @03:02AM (#27115061)
When I was a physics student, I would have loved a spreadsheet that tracks units, and automatically does conversions as needed. There is another huge thing that this enables: Tracking uncertainties. It would be awesome if you could not just write "10", but "10 cm ± 1 cm". Then the spreadsheet could do error propagation! Even the simplest case of non-correlated errors would be useful. Also you could have functions like "weighted mean" that take the errors into account. We used to do these calculations manually with extra columns and a few macros, but it was always error prone.

Also, why is there no CAD program that allows me to enter errors? When I try to model real objects, say a room, the lengths never add up 100% and I always have gaps once I'm around the room. It would be great to say all these measurements are ± 1 cm, this one is ± 5 cm, and these angles are 90° ± 1°. And then it would do least-squares, and give me a really accurate model, or tell me where I have to measure again.

Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by arethuza on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @05:34AM (#27116026)
For a while I toyed with writing an extensible spreadsheet engine/app that would allow extensions to do that kind of thing - maybe I should dust that idea off again! ;-)
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by captainmuon on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @12:28PM (#27120118)
Seems like many people started on this but never finished it, me too. I got carried away trying to speed up my custom grid control, and borked it up when I tried to use threads :-P.
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by arethuza on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @04:34AM (#27128083)
I wanted to write something that would be "spreadsheet" like that would work as a normal desktop app, as a component in a server application and on the command line as well.

Combine that with all of the other grandiose plans (writing extension in WASM) then it's no wonder that I wasn't making too much progress... interesting though!

Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by PascLeRasc on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @05:07PM (#27123532)
Fusion 360 has tolerance parameters, that should work for you: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-expl...
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by Crazor on Saturday May 15, 2021 @12:25PM (#27166578)
Well, that‘s only for drawings and not for modelling. Also it‘s manual/cosmetic.
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by agumonkey on Wednesday May 12, 2021 @12:53PM (#27132439)
For the sake of humour, isn't it a chapter in OnLisp ?
Re:Atlas, a hopefully better engineering IDE by AYBABTME on Tuesday May 11, 2021 @07:50AM (#27116920)
I built a Go library that would track units + errors when I was doing my undergrad... but never published it anywhere and lost the files, sadly. Anyways, I agree this would be neat.