About five years ago, Justin Gravett made his first contributions to OpenVSP. He has had his hands in pretty much every version since 3.9.0 and has been the source of most of the progress for about the last three and a half years.
Justin started by adding the 2D SVG and DXF export followed by XPatch export support. He expanded our API coverage to be far more complete, also writing API documentation with examples for every routine.
Justin has kept the VSPAERO GUI up with Dave Kinney’s continuous progress, also developing the VSPAERO V&V script. The OpenVSP v3 Incarnation of FEAMesh structures capability was written by Justin. It represented a huge capability leap from what was in v2.
Justin developed our capability to export intersected STEP and IGES files including BREP solids. He also developed the Generic XSec lending great freedom to geometry modeling.
I’m sure I’m missing other contributions. All along the way, he has found and fixed countless bugs across the codebase.
OpenVSP isn’t losing Justin – but we are going to see less of him. He is moving on to the next adventure in his life where OpenVSP will be more of a side hustle than his main gig. We wish him luck and extend the greatest of thanks for all he has done for OpenVSP.
On to the 3.25.0 release…
This version is mostly bug fixes, but also has a significant update to VSPAERO. Everyone should upgrade.
We have dropped the pre-built binaries for Win32. Our build system was having trouble finding Python for Win32, so we’re going to drop it and see if anyone notices. If this is a problem for you, ask on the Google Group and we’ll figure something out.
We hopefully have finally resolved the Python version issues we’ve had.
Win64 should be at Python 3.6.8
MacOS should be at Python 3.6.14
Ubuntu 20.04 should use ‘apt-get install python3’ which is 3.8.10
Ubuntu 18.04 should use ‘apt-get install python3’ which is 3.6.9
If the consensus is that we should move our Windows/MacOS Python support forward, we should be able to do so easily — help us form a consensus on the Google Group.
Is anyone out there using OpenVSP Python API with Python 2?
VSPAERO v6.2.0 comes with lots of bug fixes and improvements including span load distribution plots for thick-surface solutions. The VSPAERO viewer now does screenshots with PNG files and adds some animation generation support across platforms. Generating a movie requires ffmpeg somewhere in your path.
The force/moment calculations are all re-written to use the Kutta Jukowski theorem for lift and drag, but explicit downwash calculations at edge centers (instead of loop averages). Some differences are seen in drag, so Cd is calculated from the KJ theorem, but it also writes out Cdi as calculated from a TE / Trefftz-type method. They should generally match for steady cases.
We now include OpenVSP and VSPAERO support for the experimental *.vspgeom file. There are features to add and bugs to work out, but this will eventually be the only way of communicating geometry from OpenVSP to VSPAERO. Think of it like a free development preview.
Features:
- Updated VSPAERO Solver, Viewer, and CPSlicer to v6.2.0
- Support for ReCref sweeps in VSPAERO
- Adds reading of VSPAERO *.polar results
- Improves behavior of vertical scroll bars
- Add Mach and set name to Wave Drag output and file name (thanks anwarmou)
- Improves drag and drop for skinning parameters (thanks anwarmou)
- Improves detection of feature line and planar part intersections
- Improves Debian installation instructions (thanks Cibin Joseph)
Bug Fixes:
- Fixes for Total Wing Parameter Calculations
- Fixes crash with exactly aligned Prop XSecs
- Fixes upper/lower design mode for BORGeoms
- Fixes multiple issues with parameter links
- Fixes memory leaks in FEA Mesh and resizable columns
- Updates shell property specification in NASTRAN export
- Fix clearing of VSPAERO CpSlicer results
- Fixes Python version specification in GitHub Actions build
- Fixes update issue for Variable Presets
- Fix problem with VSPAERO viewer not launching
Other:
- Increases minimum CMake version from 2.8 to 3.1