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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
by captainmuon 5y ago
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.
- arethuza 5y agoFor 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! ;-)
- captainmuon 5y agoSeems 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.
- arethuza 5y agoI 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!
- AYBABTME 5y agoI 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.
- PascLeRasc 5y agoFusion 360 has tolerance parameters, that should work for you: https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-explore/caas/screencast/Main/Details/d86b4bc4-dfc4-4f7a-81b1-c28eae331506.html https://knowledge.autodesk.com/support/fusion-360/learn-expl...
- Crazor 5y agoWell, that‘s only for drawings and not for modelling. Also it‘s manual/cosmetic.
- agumonkey 5y agoFor the sake of humour, isn't it a chapter in OnLisp ?