Here is an EXCLUSIVE, especially for the Engineers, Mathematicians & scientists out there! Scilab is now available on Android. And what’s more, it completely retains its original open-source flavour.
A team from IIT Bombay, under the aegis of the National Mission on Education through ICT (a flagship initiative of the Ministry of HRD, Govt. of India) has been working on a port of Scilab for Android. The motivation for the Android port was because the low cost tablet device “Aakash” that the Ministry of HRD of GoI is planning on giving to students in India has Android as it’s operating system.
While Prof. Kannan, the leader of the team at IIT Bombay, says this is still a work in progress, they are the first in the world to bring to you a video of Scilab on an Android tablet!
What is Scilab?
Scilab is the state of the art computational package. It can be used in the design and simulation of engineering systems. It can be used by mathematicians and social scientists. It can also be used for simple calculations. It can be used by students in schools to those who do research. It is available absolutely free of cost. It is also an excellent open source alternative to Matlab.
Who uses Scilab?
Students, scientists and engineers. It can also be used for data acquisition and control.
Why is an Android port such a big thing?
Until now, Scilab has not been ported to Android to run in native mode. The team at IIT Bombay had previously ported it on to Debian running as an App under Android. Unfortunately, however, Scilab may run slowly if not installed in native mode.
This is the first time that Scilab has been ported to Android to run in native mode. The speed is excellent, given that the underlying hardware is a simple Arm Cortex A8 processor, with very little accessories, such as RAM. As a matter of fact, the team at IIT Bombay says the graphs getting generated are at speeds comparable to desktops. If Scilab runs fast, one can simulate even complicated models in a reasonable time and too on the go on an Android Tablet.
The best part is – Scilab will come pre-installed on Aakash.