nixnixnix Messages: 415 Registered: February 2007 Location: Kelowna, British Columbia
Senior Member
Hi there,
A few years ago I wrote what is the industry standard software for designing wind-farms (please try not to laugh too hard those of you who are familiar with the level of my coding skills). Recently, I have been making something similar but better for a well-respected US consultancy and they have agreed that the best way forward is for this software to be launched as an open source software to encourage collaboration and participation from academics and other interested parties.
I am still in the development stage and am not ready to launch this on the open source community as yet (target date is summer 2008) but here is a screen shot which may give some idea of the theme of the GUI.
At the moment I am starting to ask outside other friendly consultancies to start testing the software. I do think though that this will mean a significant influx of UPP users and a lot of indirect publicity for UPP. I hope you have sufficient server capacity
Please feel free to post impressions, questions or suggestions.
Sorry to say that, but I wouldn't expect too much from open-sourcing here. Upp is still not very popular and mostly appeals to mISV types. Your application is vertical market, not of common interest, and probably requires highly specific domain knowledge from potential contributors. You'll probably want to directly contact researchers and students of the field. Contributers won't just come from bringing it online.
nixnixnix Messages: 415 Registered: February 2007 Location: Kelowna, British Columbia
Senior Member
Thanks for the feedback and you have it exactly right. We expect people to hear about it through the industry as we will be making a lot of effort to publicize it over the coming year at various wind energy industry events. Also, there are lots of academic and government sponsored researchers who we feel would welcome the opportunity to contribute to best practices in the way that wind energy is assessed. This is in addition to other consultancies who we already know would welcome the chance to be able to add their own code.
I don't expect or want it to appeal to everyone and I wasn't recruiting here. I was merely saying that this app is built entirely with UPP and will hopefully change the industry it is intended for. I realise that UPP does not have a large base but that Mirek and others do want to promote UPP and thats why I decided to add this context. A UPP project like this is very easy to contribute to as the IDE is free and very user-friendly. Also, if I do my job right, contributors can code fairly generic C++ code to slot their expertise into our framework. People who want to contribute will probably want to get into UPP.
I hadn't noticed anyone making open source apps with UPP so I thought I would trumpet mine
mr_ped Messages: 826 Registered: November 2005 Location: Czech Republic - Praha
Experienced Contributor
Looks very interesting! Nice work so far, keep it up.
Don't forget to post the site here once it goes OSS. Especially if there will be still some "TODO" work even for people without wind energy knowledge, so even some ordinary programmers may contribute couple of lines. I think I will never find some spare time to do it, but the screenshot looks fancy enough to make me feel already pity for not contributing too.
It is rapidly gaining industry acceptance and I am getting requests for a commercial (paid) version. I really could not have undertaken this project on any other platform than U++.
I have a link to UPP on my website but I'm about to add one to the AboutBox too
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