[kde-edu]: SOC proposal: a Smith Chart application

[Frederik Gladhorn]

Hi Alejandro,

your application was on time indeed.
When you log in to the SoC web interface you can see your application.
There was a question for you which you haven't answered yet.
At the moment there is no-one on the KDE-Edu team that feels able to mentor 
your application, so asking on kde-devel was maybe a good idea.

Regards,
Frederik

On Friday 03 April 2009 14:03:22 Alejandro Exojo wrote:
> Hi.
>
> Maybe it's a little late, but if you don't mind, I want to introduce myself
> and my idea for a Summer of Code application.
>
> Mi name is Alex, I'm a Electrical Engineering student in Universitat
> Autonoma de Barcelona. I've been using free software in general, and KDE in
> particular since a long time ago (about 2002/2003). I've been moderately
> involved with KDE during this years. I did translations to Spanish, and
> helped the rest of the team where I could (committing their translations to
> CVS/SVN mostly). I also packaged two KDE-based applications for Debian
> (konserve and kxmleditor), and I did some patches here and there, and some
> where accepted (at least one in kicker and other in knotes that I can
> remember).
>
> I've been lurking many mailinglists during this years, and I've always
> wanted to be more involved with KDE. I've done coding almost only with
> Qt/KDE 3, so I will need to refresh my skills, though. :-)
>
> My idea for the SOC, is a simple to use but complete Smith Chart
> application that can help students (and professionals) of electrical
> engineering that work with this tool (it's usually called RF engineering or
> microwave engineering). This chart is a nomogram, that is, is like a ruler
> with two scales in it (e.g. centimeters and inches), and you can use it to
> convert from one unit to the other without any calculation. The Smith Chart
> is quite more complex and powerful, of course. In this days, is no longer
> used to make the calculations, because calculators and computers make this
> a charm, but is still widely used to represent points, paths and regions
> (some components move the characteristics of the circuit from one point to
> the other). Simulation programs like Qucs (free software) or Agilent's ADS
> (proprietary) use the Smith Chart as one way to plot the data of the
> simulation.
>
> My application would be way simpler than a simulation program. It will only
> plot a nice Smith Chart, and allow the user to trace these paths, points
> and regions in it with a convenient interface. It should also feature a way
> to add components, so you can add the element to the circuit, and see its
> effect on it. It's also important to allow the user to edit the values of
> the existing components in a straightforward way, because it's key to the
> design of matching networks.
>
> I will post the complete details this afternoon (CEST) in the SOC site. I
> just want to explain potential mentors that even if the purpose of the
> application maybe seems quite specialized and hard to understand to a
> person that never has done any high frequency work, I think that this will
> be no problem at all. My main concerns about developing it are not related
> with this part, and I think I can handle it well, and make it easy to
> understand to a mentor who knows nothing about electrical engineering.
>
> I'm sending this message to both kde-devel and kde-edu because I think it's
> important that this kind of applications (university level) are added to
> the KDE EDU project. I think that both the Summer of Code and applications
> that are attractive to university students are a great way of making young
> people aware of free and open source software.
>
> Greetings.

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