MATLAB - Free alternatives, Matlab clones - which ones?

I've used Octave recently to save some money for one of my biomechanics. It works well but you have to get used to a few finicky things and be prepared to do everything via command line including labels, axis, exporting graphs etc. Although I think qtoctave gives a gui to it but I could never get it to install on my mac. If you install it properly it should be pretty easy to get the additional packages (for example I needed the signal processing toolkit - unfortunately I added the functions manually - which took all of an additional 5 mins btw). Certainly wouldn't hurt to give it a shot.

i have a scientist that i support who needed to do tensor calculus calculations, we didnt want to spend a lot of money on matlab so we went with octave. seems to work well.

You can get Matlab (not clone) and all its extensions free online...gotta look.

I have used Octave, I think. It is for data. Isnt Matlab for matrices.

I can definitely find Matlab and PLPs and cracks free online. However, my institution would not look kindly upon using pirated software for research. I have Matlab legally now, but am working with a few others who do not have licenses for it and would like to transition to something that will save money.

I use Matlab for all types of data analysis, including biomechanics (EMG and 3D motion analysis), which does require signal processing.

If you arent' using large data sets, you can use the student edition, which is limited, but still can use all the toolboxes etc. I haven't done that for about 10 years, so there may be more limitations now. You can probably write an internal or external small grant to get a license for the full version. You don't need to keep current on it to keep it working.

Where can you get MATLAB free online...I highly doubt this is true

seriouslyserious wrote:

Where can you get MATLAB free online...I highly doubt this is true

Pirate bay.

It depends on what folks are interested in. If you are doing a bunch of optimization (ala CPLEX, KNITRO, MINOS...) then one programming language I have found very good is AMPL. If I remember correctly you can get a free trial at their website.

You can get the previous version of matlab (2007 i think?) for free online with a license and it works fine. The problem for me is that most of my code requires the more advanced optimization functions which only exist in the newer matlab (2009?) which i have so far not located online for free.

Depends what you want to do. For basic stuff, there are many alternatives to matlab. For me though, the value of matlab is in the powerful optimization routines which are difficult to replicate.

sprintf wrote:

I can definitely find Matlab and PLPs and cracks free online. However, my institution would not look kindly upon using pirated software for research. I have Matlab legally now, but am working with a few others who do not have licenses for it and would like to transition to something that will save money.

I use Matlab for all types of data analysis, including biomechanics (EMG and 3D motion analysis), which does require signal processing.

The biomechanics class I was in, we were able to do force plate, video, 3d motion system, and emg analysis all with octave. The only signal processing function I needed that wasn't included in Octave was butter (the butterworth filter function) which I downloaded (and it's required functions) from:

The installation instructions for additional packages are here:

But for me I just extracted the package and copy and pasted the functions I needed into the default Octave function directory.

Sounds like that should work for me then - that is almost exactly what I would be using it for. Just was playing around with accelerometer data in Matlab tonight and EMG data last week. I will check it out.

guessing wrote:

seriouslyserious wrote:

Where can you get MATLAB free online...I highly doubt this is true

Pirate bay.

Exactly, that is not free, that is Stolen.

Get Real Real wrote:

guessing wrote:

Pirate bay.

Exactly, that is not free, that is Stolen.

No it is shared.

I think Octave is comparable. I used it for a graduate level class in Linear Algebra as an alternative to buying Matlab.

What do you want to do with it?

OCTAVE FTW

Here is an online matlab clone:

http://www.mathator.com/

Its great advantage is that it is always accesible from internet, and from everywhere. It allows to program m-file style algorithms, plot graphs and other basic matlab fuctionality, although it is a small application compared to matlab.

Octave and Scilab are two good choices. Scilab also has Scicos which is like Simulink, but with ugly icons.

The choice really depends on what you are doing with it.

Some other alternatives of note are Scipy, R, and Sagemath. It is hard to describe the differences without applying them to a problem.

R functions are also available in the other two programs. There are several Scipy suites too. One is

http://www.pythonxy.com/

http://www.scipy.org/

http://www.r-project.org/

http://www.sagemath.org/

Now get going on some Ventolin^2 like calulations.

Matlab is the standard.. and you get what you pay for.

Everyone who is waiting around for sourceforge or linux distros to make the world a better place: sack up and just buy it.. its not that expensive.