Current state of bdsim

[petercorke]

As of Jan 2023.

Over the last year , my attention has been spread a bit too thinly across two book projects and multiple packages (machine vision toolbox, spatial math toolbox and robotics toolbox). Consequently bdsim hasn't gotten the love that it should have.

The next edition of the book should be out in a couple of months and since it depends on bdsim there's been a recent burst of activity polishing model files and also the core of bdsim. I've just pushed version 1.0.0 to pypi and updated master branch. The code has been formatted with black and I've switched to using build as the build system.

You can find a lot of models in the book's repo.

bdedit

bdedit is the Qt-based GUI for bdsim and might be interesting to many people but it should be considered as beta code. It's very useful but still crashes a bit more than I would like. I didn't write it and I don't want to end up being responsible for it.

If you know Qt and would like to help out please let me know.

other work

• there is still a need for a better integrator, see earlier comments
• a continuous- and discrete-time PID control block are still high on my TODO list
• Python typing throughout to enable autocompletion while creating models
• the ability to change block parameters during execution will be useful and I'm still noodling around with ideas there
• the real-time version, running on a Raspberry Pi or similar, can do quite useful control at upto 50Hz. We need drivers for i/o boards and probably also some profiling and optimisation of the diagram execution engine.

[petercorke]

I've just uploaded 1.1.2 to PyPI. Mostly just reversing entropy associated with changes in Python 3.12 and Numpy2.

I am having some problems installing Qt5 for Python 3.12 but for me that's not a showstopper with bdsim. If you really want Qt you're on your own.