Graphical CAE notebook options

christian_petty

I really like PTC Mathcad as a general calculation engineering notebook, but it has its shortcomings. The GUI is excellent and it handles units the best of any program I’ve seen. But, it hasn’t completely embraced modern programming paradigms however, and it only runs on Windows. I access the API with VBA to help expand some capabilities, but it isn’t ideal nor in the cloud. Mathcad also has a simple GUI for pushing/pulling data to/from Creo using embedded notebooks.

Moving to Onshape I’m looking for every way to keep things in the cloud. I could probably write some glue between Onshape’s API and a local instance of Mathcad, but this only solves part of the problem.  

Are there plans for or interest in a graphical engineering notebook for Onshape as a natural PTC companion like Mathcad is to Creo?

Which platforms/workflows have you found that work today?

eric_pesty

I thought there was something a bit like that in the app store but I can't seem to find it anymore...

Smath would be neat to see integrated as it emulates a lot of the user-friendliness of MathCAD while being open source and includes a "cloud" version as well: 
https://en.smath.com/cloud/sheet/ApYhT43wyH

I do use it quite a bit, especially when I have some calculations to do that don't fit within a few Excel cells... The built in unit management is especially useful for all sorts of design calculations (and provides some level of error checking...).

It would be neat to be able to link Onshape variables to the output (and take others as input)! Although to really leverage it there needs to be some "higher level" "variables" capabilities to affect assemblies as well rather than just part. Even being able to have an Smath tab in a document (that could be edited directly rather than having to download/upload files) would be pretty useful!

matthew_mueller537

Hello @radianrad. I've been using Google Colab (cloud hosted Jupyter notebooks) as a way of using Python to get/set data from Onshape and automate workflows with Python. All in the cloud and super easy to get started. This webpage has a bunch of sample notebooks (including integrations with Google Sheets) with some getting started videos on how to use this API snippets library. Would love to hear any feedback on what kind of use cases you're imagining for this type of integration.

christian_petty

Hello!

@eric_pesty. Hmm Smath. I see that there is a cloud version, but I'm not sure exactly how it's being hosted. Is it all client-side? This looks interesting.

@matthew_mueller537 this is awesome! One scenario is structural hand calcs and pulling COG and dimensions from configurations or experimental scenarios.

Thanks for the input