{"id":4303,"date":"2012-05-13T09:58:52","date_gmt":"2012-05-13T08:58:52","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4303"},"modified":"2012-05-22T14:50:33","modified_gmt":"2012-05-22T13:50:33","slug":"help-get-octave-developed-for-android-like-matlab-but-free","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/walkingrandomly.com\/?p=4303","title":{"rendered":"Help get Octave developed for Android! (like MATLAB, but free)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The MATLAB language has become ubiquitous in many fields of applied mathematics such as linear algebra, differential equations, control systems and signal processing among many others.\u00a0 MATLAB is a great tool but it also costs a lot!\u00a0 If you are not a student then MATLAB is a very<\/strong> expensive piece of software.\u00a0 For example, my own academic licensed copy with just 4 toolboxes cost more than the rather high powered laptop I use it on.\u00a0 If I left academia then there would be no chance of me owning a copy unless I found an employer willing to stump up the cash for a commercial license.\u00a0 Commercial licenses cost a LOT more than academic licenses.<\/p>\n

Octave – The free alternative<\/strong><\/p>\n

The good news is that there is a free alternative to MATLAB in the form of Octave<\/a>.\u00a0 Octave attempts to be source compatible with MATLAB which means that, in many cases, your MATLAB code will run as-is on Octave.\u00a0 Many of the undergraduate courses taught at my university (The University of Manchester<\/a>) could be taught using Octave with little or no modification and I imagine that this would be the case elsewhere.\u00a0 One area where Octave falls down is in the provision of toolboxes but this is improving thanks to the Octave-Forge<\/a> project.<\/p>\n

Addi – The beginnings of MATLAB\/Octave on Android<\/strong><\/p>\n

As Dylan said The Times They Are a-Changin’<\/a> and there is an ever-increasing segment of world-society that are simply skipping over the PC and going straight to mobile devices for their computing needs.\u00a0 It is possible to get your hands on a functional Android mobile phone or tablet for significantly less than the cost of a PC.\u00a0\u00a0 These cheap mobile devices may be a lot less powerful than even the cheapest of PCs but they are powerful enough for many purposes and are perfectly capable of outgunning Cray supercomputers<\/a> from the past.<\/p>\n

There is, however, no MATLAB for Android devices.\u00a0 The best we have right now is in the form of Addi<\/a>, a free Android app that makes use of JMathLib<\/a> to provide a very scaled-back MATLAB-like experience.\u00a0 Addi is the work of Corbin Champion<\/a>, an android developer from Portland in the US, and he has much bigger plans for the future.<\/p>\n

Full Octave\/GNUPlot on Android with no caveats<\/strong><\/p>\n

Corbin is working on a full Octave and GNUPlot* port for Android.\u00a0 He has already included a proof of concept in the latest release of Addi which includes an experimental Octave interpreter.\u00a0 To go from this proof of concept to a fully developed Android port, however, is going to take a lot of work.\u00a0 Corbin is up to the task but he would like our help.<\/p>\n

[* – GNUPLot<\/a> is used as the plotting engine for Octave and includes support for advanced 3D graphics]<\/p>\n

Donate as little as $1 to help make this project possible<\/strong><\/p>\n

Corbin has launched a Kickstarter project<\/a> in order to try to obtain funding for this project.\u00a0 He freely admits that he’ll do the work whether or not it gets funded but will be able to devote much more of his time to the project if the funding request is successful.\u00a0 After all, we all need to eat, even great sotware developers.<\/p>\n

Although I have never met him, I believe in Corbin and strongly believe that he will deliver on his promise.\u00a0 So much so that I have pledged $100 to the project out of my own pocket.<\/p>\n

If, like me, you want to see a well-developed and supported version of Octave on Android then watch the video below and then head over to Corbin’s kickstarter page<\/a> to get the full details of his proposal.\u00a0 The minimum donation is only $1 and your money will only be taken if the full funding requirement is met.<\/p>\n