Daily Archives: August 2, 2008

PawEng Software

Master Bender

August 2, 2008 – 9:54 pm

The past few years I have been working on Master Bender. It is a tool for Palm and Windows Mobile to assist electricians in the field. It is targeted at bending conduit, but contains a number of other features including a complete scientific calculator and unit converter.

When you bend conduit, you must consider that the conduit shrinks due to the detour it takes. There are rules-of-thumb for estimating how much it shrinks, but those rules break down for large diameter conduit or large bending angles

Master Bender’s algorithms automatically compensate for shrink for any angle, and it takes the characteristics of the bender into account. The results are far more precise than is possible using rules-of-thumb.

Master Bender computes accurate offset bends, three and four point saddle bends, parallel bends and more. It also contains a full scientific calculator, easy conversions between more than 250 units, Ohm’s Law computations, power computations, locked rotor currents, and more.

I developed Master Bender together with electrician Lewis Hinkle to ensure that it would be useful for work in the field.

Read more about Master Bender.

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PawEng Software

PawCalc — A powerful scientific calculator for Palm OS

August 2, 2008 – 9:25 pm

When I got my first Palm PDA some ten years ago, I wanted to use it was a calculator. I was not satisfied with the rather limited built-in calculator program of my Palm V, so I decided to write my own. The result was PawCalc. Many years and multiple versions later, PawCalc 2.3 was ready.

PawCalc 2.3 is a powerful scientific and programmable calculator for Palm, and it includes everything from unit conversions and constants to complex numbers and fractions. And yes, it also does “normal” math. You can even add your own units and constants.

PawCalc is an expression-based calculator. This means that you type in expressions just like you would write them on paper. For example, if you want to calculate “32+2*5*sin 360″, then you just type that into PawCalc.

Here is what one user said in July 2008:

Your calculator is the best available today. [...] I continue to use an old Palm device simply to access your calculator. I have heard many engineer and scientist types comment on how useful you calculator is in practice. It is a terrific tool that stand uniquely between a calculator and a programing language such as MatLab.

As far as I have been able to determine yours is the only product of this type available where you can write an equation and then try different parameter values without having to rewrite the whole expression every time.

PawCalc is shareware. Read more about PawCalc at http://paweng.com/pawcalc.

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