Project updates: January 2022

It brings me great pleasure to announce that a new version of FOMCON toolbox (v1.50.1) is finally available! Below, I provide a few details about this release. Major changes:
• Update to the Grünwald-Letnikov based FODE solver: added higher-order numerical solver options — the default and only available option up to this point was the first order solver; now, the user gets the option of also choosing second and third order numerical schemes for computing the time domain response of systems described by fractional-order transfer function objects. The setting can be configured in the new option GL_Order found under Simulations in the toolbox configuration.
• Completely rewritten is the configuration options handler. This is, in some ways, a breaking change, but at the same time one that should not affect the majority of users. Whereas before the user had to store or recall toolbox-wide configuration options him or herself and the configuration was stored in MATLAB workspace rather than in the user’s file system, the new approach is to: (1) Store the configuration as a file in the user’s home directory under the .fomcon-matlab folder. This way, the configuration options are persistent from session to session. (2) Perform a check on the options, so if new options are added in the future, there is no backwards compatibility problem. On the other hand, the validity of the inserted values/ranges for the configuration parameters are currently not checked, this is a feature that was also missing previously and will be added in the future.
• Added a new demo which pertains to the above mentioned solver update to show the differences in the solutions that can be obtained using various methods and with different solver orders.
• Released a packaged toolbox version of the toolbox.
Minor changes:
• Some minor bugs/compatibility problems have been fixed.
Known issues:
• In newer versions of MATLAB, a warning is displayed when the UI of the toolbox configuration dialog is displayed about the deprecation of certain Java components. In FOMCON, a contribution called propertiesGUI is used to display this configuration box and it has not been updated since 2015. In a future version of the toolbox, it is likely to be replaced with a custom, programmatic UI.
What’s more, the toolbox can now be directly installed from MATLAB, so no more GitHub downloads/messing around with MATLAB path. You just locate it in the Add-on Explorer and install it in one click!

And that’s not all!

I would like to direct your attention to an alpha release of FOMCON toolbox for Python 3! You can check it out on GitHub (https://github.com/outstandn/fomcon) and find out more by visiting this link with the information about the associated paper and a conference talk. If you find it useful, please help spreading the word and cite the following paper:

What? There’s even more?

Yes! Many new exciting features in the toolbox are currently being worked on that will be deployed for testing later this year! Stay tuned!
This entry was posted in Project news and tagged , , , , . Bookmark the permalink. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.