Future & related work

The TODO list of doom

• bdsim project board

some of these don't make sense now...

Related work

related to bdsim

These packages share some of the design aims of bdsim:

• PathSim A Time-Domain System Simulation Framework for Python
• PyFlow
• BMSpy
• PySim
• SimuPy
• PyLinX
• SimPy

related to bdedit

• https://hackernoon.com/my-top-13-javascript-diagram-libraries-g2a53z6u
• https://app.diagrams.net/?ref=hackernoon.com
• xcos

PyQt5 has some licence issues, and PySide6 has been suggested as an alternative. Quite some work to make the change, but we would get the benefit of upgrading to "Qt6".

An alternative is to move to a full JS-based editor like GoJS.

Future work

Hardware

Create i/o block that allow BDsim on something like a Raspberry Pi to control physical hardware. For example a wrapper on Pigpio and other i/o libraries.

Firmata or Telemetrix allow an Arduino to act as an i/o server over WiFi or USB comms.

Vision

Create blocks that wrap OpenCV functions to acquire images and process them with a set of useful algorithmic blocks.

Numerical integration

Numerical integration is at the very heart of bdsim which essentially turns a block diagram into a first-order differential equation which is integrated over time. Currently using a very standard integrator from SciPy which is being used for continuous and hybrid systems. There is a rudimentary event system built on top of this, but it would be better to consider any of the following:

• survey of what's out there here
• a [SciPy integrator that supports event functions] (https://docs.scipy.org/doc/scipy/reference/generated/scipy.integrate.solve_ivp.html#scipy.integrate.solve_ivp).
• Event functions are described in Combined continuous/discrete system simulation by use of digital computers, F.E.Cellier, ETH Thesis, 1979. DOI: 10.3929/ethz-a-000258490
• DifferentialEquation.jl written in Julia which is callable from Python, see diffeqpy and details of event callbacks
• CVODE from the Sundials package via the FMPy
• Port odedc from Scilab.

A good test of event functions would be to replicate the dynamics of a bouncing ball.