Page 62 - Shock and Vibration Overview

Analysis Software Options

The big disadvantage of MATLAB is that it's not free; a commercial license will cost
$2,150. They also charge more, typically $1,000, for additional toolboxes (here's a
full price list of the MATLAB products); and I'd recommend the signal processing
toolbox for vibration analysis. Don't worry though, I didn't use any functions in that
toolbox for this analysis or the ones covered in my vibration analysis basics blog.

If code base programming seems daunting, MATLAB does have their Simulink block
diagram environment. This is a compelling product that can help reduce human
programming induced errors and allow teams of analysts to integrate their algorithms a

little easier. A single commercial license is $3,350 (in addition to a MATLAB license).
Simulink also lets engineers interface with hardware such as National Instruments,
Raspberry Pi and Arduino; but these hardware supports will cost you. Simulink is great
for analyzing data in real time (another couple thousand dollars) and offers incredible
customization in addition to built-in analysis capabilities.

Python
Python is a free, open source, and very versatile programming language. Their

NumPy and SciPy packages have similar functions to MATLAB. Python is a pretty elegant
and intuitive programming language compared to MATLAB. It was created to be a
generic language that is easy to read; and they definitely succeeded with that! Python is
universally accepted as the better alternative to MATLAB for other programming needs
besides data analysis.

But if you ask what’s better, MATLAB or Python for vibration analysis, you may start a
heated debate because they both have benefits and disadvantages. We recently did
some testing to compare MATLAB and Python for vibration analysis and came to the
conclusion that for basic analysis (including FFTs) Python can match and even beat
MATLAB computation times; but the programmer may need to do a bit of digging to find
and download all the necessary libraries. But these libraries will be free!

As a MATLAB user I found the Anaconda distribution of Python and its most popular
libraries very helpful. The Spyder development environment, shown in Figure 45, has a

similar interface and feel to MATLAB for those with MATLAB experience.

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