About

Visual Dynamics is a units-aware toolset for structural dynamics test work, written from scratch.

This toolset was created to streamline workflow and lower the barrier to entry for structural dynamics analysis. One project holds the whole job: import a run, look at it, identify what is in it, compare it against a requirement and write the report. Each step works on the objects the step before it produced, so nothing has to be exported and read back in between.

Principles

Thirteen written principles guide the design. Among them: data should be visible and easy to handle, the interface shows only what applies to the current selection, and the scripting API can do everything the interface can. An analysis worked out by hand on one run can therefore be repeated by a script over a hundred runs.

Read the principles.

Built with AI

This tool was developed using the best AI tools available at the time. AI use is encouraged and embraced in this project to develop code and fix bugs as fast as possible.

Using AI is one of the thirteen principles, and the rest of them apply to it. Every fix is checked by breaking it on purpose and confirming that a test fails, and the full test suite has to pass before a change is merged.

Units

Every value carries its quantity and its unit. Data is stored in SI and converted when it is displayed, so a plot in g and the same plot in m/s² come from the same stored numbers. Data imported from a file that does not declare its units is kept as it was read and marked as having unknown units until you define them.

References

The spectral conventions follow Bendat and Piersol, and the way a channel is described follows the universal file format. Methods from published work and from open structural dynamics tools were studied and then implemented here independently; no code is copied from them.

The people and projects the ideas came from, and the people who contributed code, are thanked on the acknowledgments page.

License

Visual Dynamics is open source under the MIT License. You may use it, change it and build it into your own work, open or closed, as long as the copyright notice goes with it. How the installers are signed is described in the code signing policy.

Contributing

Contributions are welcome from anyone. Open a pull request with a bug fix, an improvement or an addition; you do not need to ask first. A pull request that keeps the project's written rules will be merged, and the contributing guide says what they are. Small changes are as welcome as large ones.

Bug reports are very welcome too, and I will try to fix them promptly. Questions can go to [email protected].