you're welcome to participate in the QElelectroTech (QET) project! Your skills are very interesting because you know both C++ and electrical engineering. In this mail, I will try to give you an overview of the project. _*Involved contributors and users:*_ /Joshua/ (France) http://qelectrotech.org/forum/profile.php?id=766, is the main developer. He's a "self made Qt/C++ developer" and a user of QElectroTech. He began to develop with Qt/C++ as the initial developer Xavier leave the project (about 2010, if I good remember what he said). He codes the main developments and brings the "big new features". /Laurent / Scorpio810/ (France) http://qelectrotech.org/forum/profile.php?id=8 is not really a developer but has already made some new convenient features who don't require a big C++ knowledge background. Laurent holds the project alive and focuses on the forum (all questions are answered within 12 hours, better than a hotline!). He builds the Linux Debian packages and the MS Windows installers (cross compiling, XP --> 10). And do a lot of work about and around the project (communication, mails, subversion, coordinates translators and packagers, etc...) Laurent is also a QET user for his job (maintenance electrician in the wood process automation industry). /Ronny / rdsvid/ (Netherland) http://qelectrotech.org/forum/profile.php?id=1915 wrote the dxf converter. This is a tool to convert a dxf file into an elmt file which can be read in QElectroTech. The converter already good works but the development is not completely achieved. Look at this: http://download.tuxfamily.org/qet/builds/dxf_to_elmt/ I think Ronny is also a QET user. /René / runsys/ (France) http://qelectrotech.org/forum/profile.php?id=2012 is an electrical instructor and he knows C++. He's working on pathfinding functionalities. Like this: http://download.tuxfamily.org/qet/runsys/out.ogv ...and many other people and users who participate in the project. At this time, I don't know all the active contributors. The translators team is really active and the GUI of QElectroTech is available in many languages. QET is also available on Mac OS X and other Linux distributions which are not Debian based. This job is done by the packagers team. And me: /Nuri/ (Germany, but I'm french) http://qelectrotech.org/forum/profile.php?id=1905 I'm an automation hardware engineer and I'm working "stand alone" as a freelancer for many industrial sectors: pharmaceutical, automotive, paper, chemical, special machinery... I'm using Eplan since 2002 for all my jobs. Since last year, I'm using QET to design control cabinets of CNC machines. I'm not a C++ developer. I translate the GUI of QET to german since the version 0.4 and help the team everywhere i can help. _*Goals of the QElectroTech project:*_ There is no "official" document where the goals are written in. Initially, QElectroTech was created by 2 french students in the middle of the 2000's. The first one (Benoît) studied electrical engineering and the second one (Xavier) information technology and programming. Xavier made all the technical choices for QET: developement in C++ with the Qt framework, xml format for the .qet projects and the .elmt files. Xavier leave the project about 2009/2010 since he never was a user of his own software, "just a student who needed some material" to train his talented coding skills. This is the reason why many comments in the C++ code are written in french yet. Since Joshua carries on the coding, the new comments are in english. More and more users want to use QElectroTech as an industrial designing tool, such as softwares like Eplan Electric P8, See Electrical, WSCAD, ESC CAD, etc... I'm one of them and I think you too. Laurent pushes the project in this direction since years. The main goals of the project are: - stay free and open source - increase functionalities to faster create electrical documentations in professional quality - stay intuitive and easy to use (easier than the proprietary softwares) - keep the code maintainable by volunteer developers _*How the project works:*_ QElectroTech is a pure open source _community project_ without company support and without financial inputs. All the developers are or were volunteers who do the job on their hobby time, aside their "normal" job. QElectroTech is not developped "like a cathedral". I write "cathedral" in this meaning: http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/cathedral-bazaar/cathedral-bazaar/ This is an important particularity in the development of many open source software. It has to work but none of the contributors has really a big among of time to work on it. Indeed, the bazaar works! Most of the new features, improvments and bug fixings are coming from the community forum: http://qelectrotech.org/forum/index.php There is also an IRC channel where developpers and contributors can chat. Some more detailed subjects are also shared directly by email. *_How to develop and code: _* I think the most convenient way to develop and code can be achieved on a Debian based operating system (Debian, Ubuntu, Linux Mint...) because the other developers are using such a system. But this is not a constrain. You could also use MS Windows. You could... ;-) Assuming you use a Debian based OS, you will need at least Qt Creator and Subversion (to easily update the development version of QET). In the next days, Laurent will send you much more details on how to get ready to code. _*Current and future developments of QET:*_ Joshua worked many months on a new "elements collections panel" (QDockWidget) to decrease the RAM consumption of QET and to prepare some new features. This work is partially done. At least all the interactions with the user are now fully working. It can be tested in the 0.51 development version of QET. Future developments: It is planned to implement the installation(=)/location(+) structure system of the norm IEC 81346. This is a really big work. The current code who manages the cross referencing functionality must be rewritten, and much more... For industrial designers and users, QET lacks features to easily and quickly manage terminal strips and cables. For example, to automatically create terminal strips diagrams like (or better than) the proprietary softwares. Joshua already made some small tries: http://download.tuxfamily.org/qet/joshua/cable2.webm In the same way, QET lacks a way to generate BOMs in a "one mouse click" way and to manage an article data base. I've wrote a LibreOffice Macro to import BOMs as .elmt files in my QET project: http://download.tuxfamily.org/qet/forum_img/nuri_vid_05.ogv It works for me but this is not a perfect job for all QET users. Beyond these significant developments to come, a lot of small improvments and bug fixing are done every week. Ok... I'm done with the presentation of the project. Laurent will explain you how to join and how to get started. regards, Nuri