This page contains links to some of my feeble "software". While everything here is freely available for personal use, please be sure to observe the licence conditions if you have more extensive uses in mind.
If you download anything from this page, please register (for free).
| Webpub | Thermodynamic simulator | 1D Heat Conduction | SerialPrint | Note |
Webpub
Webpub is a simple (g)awk script to assist in publishing postscript documents on the web. I used it to produce the pages of my thesis available elsewhere on the site. Use requires that you have both Ghostscript and the pbm utilities installed on your unix system. The script produces a series of GIFs, one for each page of the postscript, linked by simple HTML to allow navigation through the pages.
Why use webpub when you can more easily convert your postscript to a pdf file? In my experience, using gif files makes your work much harder to plagarise. While pdf files produce excellent quality output in a relatively compact format, text can be copied and pasted directly from them into an editor. Using a GIF file prevents this. Anyone who wants to steal your text will have to retype it!
Simple thermodynamic simulator in Excel
A simple "simulator" in Excel/VBA for some basic engineering thermodynamic cycles: Rankine, Diesel, Otto and Joule. This is a pretty basic "simulation" that automates the hand calculations you probably learned as a undergraduate student.
More information about the simulator
Simple 1D heat conduction in Excel
A basic 1D heat conduction calculation written in Excel/VBA. There's no documentation for this. It's probably useless but someone might be able to do something productive with it! Provided entirely "as is".
SerialPrint
A program written in QBASIC/PowerBasic that copies
input from a serial port on your PC to a parallel port. NB: this only runs on "dos-like" systems - so it works fine
on Win31 and MSDOS, and is probably OK on win95.
I use it for printing out from my HP200LX palmtop (which only has a serial port) to a printer connected to a parallel port on my desktop PC. The desktop runs SerialPrint to forward data from the serial port to the printer on the parallel port.
The executable is compiled to receive serial data at 1200 baud (honest!) and to output it to lpt1. It accepts a single command line parameter - the number of the serial port it should listen to. So "hpcom9.exe 1" will listen to serial port 1 at 1200 baud and copy any data to lpt1. SerialPrint uses xon-xoff software flow control on the serial port, with 8 bit data, no parity and one stop bit.
If you want to use SerialPrint with other lpts or at a baud rate other than 1200, then you'll have to play with the source code. If there's sufficient interest, then I'll change things to make the baud rate and port configurable from the command line (it's trivial...but I'm lazy). You can run the result using QBASIC (from the oldmsdos directory on a win95 CD), or you can compile it
using PowerBasic.
Note
I'm a mechanical engineer, and not a trained programmer. These programs are not provided as examples of good programming practice, but because (i) they work and (ii) others may find them useful. Please do not bombard me with critiscisms of these programs - although any bug reports or helpful suggestions would be most welcome
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Tim Cockerill