Published on: April 01, 2009
I am a B-Tech student in University of Calicut, Kerala, India. The lab syllabus of final year electronics engineering contains “Experiments Using Matlab” which are a set of three experiments to be done using Matlab. In our college we are using Matlab. Since proprietary softwares like Matlab are not recommended in universities (see this Why schools should exclusively use free software), it is goodto use free software Octave. As I am a free software enthusiast, I love using octave instead of Matlab.
If I ask the lab staff to use Octave in the college lab, they will ask me “Will all programs work in Octave?”. Actually they are not happy to accept Octave because it is not mentioned in syllabus. Is it compulsory that students should learn only what is in the syllabus? The other true fact is that, at the end of semester there will be a lab exam. The teachers coming from other college won’t be familiar with Octave. So when they see Octave, they will surely ask to install Matlab.
One of the method to bring free software in B-Tech course (not only in B-Tech, but also in other courses) is to have a syllabus review. Thereby all will start using free software. If the syllabus changes there should be reference materials for these free software tools. The first thing everyone does if he/she doesn’t know about something is that he/she will Google it. So I thought of contributing once again to free software by writing some tutorials for Octave that can be helpful for implementing free software like Octave in universities.
These all led me to write this tutorial. This tutorial is about installing Octave and also contains some examples using Octave. I have tried to write the tutorial in a simple and lucid way. Hope this tutorial can guide university to use octave in their labs instead of Matlab.
The tutorial here explains the simple example code that can be used for teaching Octave. This tutorial is specifically designed for University of Calicut in India. But I hope the syllabus will be almost same in other universities also.
**The tutorial is in my Wiki page. You can visit the tutorial from the link below
Experiments using Octave for B-Tech course{.wikilink1}**
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