Re: Scilab and DSP

On Thu, 22 Nov 2007 02:02:25 -0500, Randy Yates wrote:

Tim Wescott <tim@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

On Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:59:02 -0500, Randy Yates wrote:

Andreas Vaerge <andreas03@xxxxxxxxxxx> writes:

In an attempt to study DSP (interest not immidiate use) I have bought
"Digital Signal Processing 3rd edition" by Proakis and Manolakis and
the self study guide also by Proakis. However it is assumed that I
have MatLab available which I cannot quite afford :-(. I have found
SciLab which (according to info on the net) should be able of doing
most of what MatLab can, just differently.
Now, I suppose I will have to convert the samples to SciLab format
and thus I was wondering if there is any guide from which I can
learn what is what in the two programs.
Alternately, is there any good (beginners) DSP book or high quality
website which uses SciLab for the samples? I do not seem to find
anything on google.

I don't mean to disrespect SciLab, but you might be better off
using GNU Octave instead. It is at least mostly compatible with
Matlab, although there are some significant differences.

http://www.octave.org

I strongly advocate using Scilab once you know your stuff, but if the book
is centered around MATLAB you would probably do well to use Octave, unless
you're really willing to sign up to figuring out the differences. If you
do, you'll be an expert coming out the other side.

Tim, what advantages do you see SciLab having over Matlab/Octave? I'm
curious - it looked like a really nice package, but I've never done
anything with it.

If you've got someone who'd rather buy you some software than a very nice
car, MATLAB is the way to go. When I looked at Octave several years ago
there was no one maintaining it, and it wasn't as polished as Scilab.
Installation was difficult and fragile, and conflicted with my Cygwin
installation (I understand that this has been fixed recently).

Mostly what I like about Scilab is that the scripting language has some
really nice object-oriented features, and that the whole package was
written by folks doing control systems. So it comes out of the box with
an extensive suite of control systems oriented features, including the
fact that both transfer functions and state-space system representations
are built-in types.

So in Scilab I can write a transfer function as easy as

H = %z / (%z - 1),

and I can the do Bode plots, or multiply it by another transfer function,
or "multiply" it (actually cascade systems) by a state-space system model.
All this makes it very easy to do what I want to do with the package.

-----
Tim Wescott
Control systems and communications consulting
http://www.wescottdesign.com

Need to learn how to apply control theory in your embedded system?
"Applied Control Theory for Embedded Systems" by Tim Wescott
Elsevier/Newnes, http://www.wescottdesign.com/actfes/actfes.html
.

Relevant Pages

  • Re: Scilab and DSP
    ... the self study guide also by Proakis. ... have MatLab available which I cannot quite afford :-(. ... SciLab which should be able of doing ...
    (comp.dsp)
  • Re: Scilab and DSP
    ... the self study guide also by Proakis. ... have MatLab available which I cannot quite afford :-(. ... SciLab which should be able of doing ...
    (comp.dsp)
  • Re: Scilab and DSP
    ... the self study guide also by Proakis. ... have MatLab available which I cannot quite afford :-(. ... SciLab which should be able of doing ...
    (comp.dsp)
  • Re: "Matlab to Scilab for Dummies" anywhere?
    ... some *.p and a few graphics GUI files *.fig. Scilab doesn't understand any of these. ... along the lines of "Matlab to Scilab file conversion for dummies"? ... I like the SciLab syntax and environment better, but it's _not_ friendly to beginners (but then neither are MatLab or Octave). ... If you're going to do a lot of work with customers who want m files then you're kind of stuck with MatLab or Octave, but I haven't had that happen to me more than once in the last three years. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
  • Re: "Matlab to Scilab for Dummies" anywhere?
    ... some *.p and a few graphics GUI files *.fig. Scilab doesn't understand any of these. ... along the lines of "Matlab to Scilab file conversion for dummies"? ... I like the SciLab syntax and environment better, but it's _not_ friendly to beginners (but then neither are MatLab or Octave). ... If you're going to do a lot of work with customers who want m files then you're kind of stuck with MatLab or Octave, but I haven't had that happen to me more than once in the last three years. ...
    (sci.electronics.design)
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