
Show HN: CADWOLF – Web-based math and engineering platform - theuttick
http://www.cadwolf.com
======
theuttick
Submitter here,

I am a long time everyday reader of HN but I have never posted or really
commented. I am a structural engineer with a few years of work in the space
program. I have spent a great deal of time building something that I think can
redefine the way we do engineering and I am close to finished with an initial
version.

I am extremely nervous about posting this, but I would love to hear what
everyone thinks. (There is a video in the overview section)

Thanks

~~~
yannis
I know it is difficult to describe complicated software simply. Make the
examples more prominent, and provide a sandbox for someone to try them. Some
people like watching videos, others don't.

~~~
theuttick
There actually is an example document that any user can fully edit. It's under
the docs and examples link.

------
auxym
As a mech engineer doing mostly structural work these days, you are definitely
solving an important problem, one which I both witness and experience first
hand every single day. Excel is used a lot, but it's error prone and sucks for
communicating your work (formulas and logic is hidden). Plus, trying to track
down the latest version of some calculation someone did 10 years ago, digging
down 29 subfolders on the common drive, ugh.

I do like projects like Jupyter (I used IPNB a lot during my masters), but it
seems like 95% of my fellow engineers feel like python/julia/even matlab are
"too complicated for something excel does". Which I disagree with (ever tried
extracting eigenvalues in excel? or simply plotting a hisogram?), but eh.
Programming is also less visual/graphic, which is one plus of excel (colors,
fonts, layout of a spreadsheet do help with processing information)

I can't say if your solution is "the one". It's too complex a problem for
that. But my personal feeling is you're tackling the right issues at the right
angle. As good as your product is though, getting traction is going to be the
hard part, by far. I wish you the best, and certainly hope I get to use your
product some day.

~~~
theuttick
I agree. There is a huge amount of "inertia" in the engineering field. People
find something they like and then use it forever.

------
techdragon
If this has trouble getting traction in engineering as originally designed...
Please pivot!

I watched the document section of your introduction video and was struck by
how elegantly it would solve my needs for a blogging platform. I may even try
using it for that without a pivot.

~~~
theuttick
Interesting that you say that. There is a spot on YC applications that asked
if you had any other ideals that you may have applied with or something along
those lines. I mentioned pivoting to just that sort of thing.

------
ovis
I think this is very interesting, although I'm still trying to understand it.
So excuse my ignorance, but how does this differ from open source projects
such as Jupyter, Sage, and JuliaBox?

~~~
jacobolus
Or, as a commercial product, from the functionality available inside Matlab,
Maple, or Mathematica? Those all have the same kind of notebook feature, but
have the additional advantage of thousands of third-party libraries.

edit to add:

This project seems to be pretty neat, and it’s clear that a ton of work has
gone into it, but I’m unlikely to ever use it.

Here’s my list of criteria for something like this:

(1) Is it open source? Am I being locked into someone’s proprietary
environment? Can I inspect the code of every function I’m calling on, to make
sure I trust them to behave correctly?

(2) Does it interoperate easily with my existing data and workflows? Can I
easily scrape a webpage to feed data in, or import from a file in some obscure
format from the 90s?

(3) Can I run it offline? Can I share it with anyone I want, and can they
build on what I’ve made without paying a license fee? [Personally I think
running on a computer locally is a big advantage over having everything done
“in the cloud” and displaying in a web page, and thus being completely
unavailable when offline. I’m assuming all the numeric code is being run on
some server somewhere? Or is all the processing done locally in Javascript?]

(4) Is there some well tested library that already solves my problem that I
can run within the tool, so that I can just download the library, use its API,
and be done without a bunch of custom work on my end?

[Or more generally: does the tool solve some problem that I can’t easily solve
in any other way?]

(5) Is the plotting functionality easy enough to make plots of data with a few
seconds of work, but flexible enough that I can make a custom data
visualization if I need to? (For a web project, I would just feed the data to
D3.)

Don’t let me discourage you though. It’s great that people are working on
tools, and quite possible that you’ll find a good market of folks who would
use this thing.

~~~
theuttick
Matlab, Maple, etc are very good at what they do, but they have two problems
that my platform solves.

1\. Your manager and/or customer can't see your work unless they have a
license and can understand the language. Mine only needs a web browser.

2\. If the analysis changes, the documentation must be updated as well. Mine
does everything on the same web page.

As for the questions, those are all ones that I have asked myself about
several times and here is where I am now.

(1) It is not open source and you really are kinda locked into using the
system once you get going. I really couldn't find a way around this as the
real appeal for most engineers is the absence of the need to code stuff. I
have documentation that describes how I solve most algorithms and some demos.

(2) Scraping web pages is high on my to do list. You can paste most forms of
data already, but you can't yet import files directly. Seeing that this is
high on someone else's list I may put most of my effort there.

(3) Right now, everything is done locally in javascript but there is no way to
save changes without server access. Part of my business plan is to use a
server side code to solve large data sets and possibly charge for that. I have
been surprised at how well the browser has handled most problems though.

(4) The main problem that this will solve for most people is this ... You get
data from a test run somewhere. You put that data on a server, run a Matlab or
Python code on it and then create a word document to pass on that info. With
my system, you upload the info, analyze it, and display the results all on the
same web page. It isn't just about analyzing the data, it's about doing
everything on the same platform.

(5) The plotting functions are pretty easy to use and you can get something up
in a few seconds. I also have 3D plotting.

~~~
jacobolus
My main suggestion would be to first find some concrete customers, and then
ask what they need. (As I said, I’m not likely to be one of them, so don’t
prioritize just based on my opinions.)

All the best luck!

~~~
theuttick
Thanks for the input and I totally get what you are saying. It may help to
know that the end goal is to tie in a CAD system. This way, each "document"
contains the math to design a component while the CAD reads from that to
display it. This way, the CAD model automatically updates with changing design
requirements just like the part trees already do. What you see is really just
a first step.

