GSoC 2025: Packaging MBDyn

Hi everyone!

I'm Nicolò Gandini, a double degree student in Computer Science and Engineering at Politecnico di Milano and KTH Royal Institute of Technology. Although I'm new to open-source, I'm eager to take my first steps into this community through GSoC 2025. My coding journey so far has involved academic projects and personal challenges, mostly in Java, C and Python.

Here you can find my GitHub page (GitHub link) and my LinkedIn profile (LinkedIn link)

I'm interested in this project because it's a new challenge for me and can be useful for other students; it would break down the barriers to entry for students who are not familiar with programming or a Linux system in general. I am aiming at the 90h project. However I am flexible and I can consider also the 175h project.

I have completed the step 1 of the entry tests of the project. Before getting into the heart of step 1, I followed the installation process. I report here some steps that I performed:

• checked the installation of: make, g++ compiler, gcc compiler, gfortran
• cloned the repository with git clone and checkout the "develop" branch
• generated the required build scripts
• created a build tree in order to built outside the source tree
• configured the packages with ./configure and build them with make

Note that all these steps and the following one were performed on a Linux machine with Linux Mint 21.

Then I performed some steps described here to complete the Step 1:

• Wrote a simple Python script to create the input file (here the link of the simple script used).
• Generated the output with ./mbdyn -f testRigibody.txt
• Installed gnuplot to view the .mov file generated by MBDyn.
• Run gnuplot and performed plot "testRigibody.mov" using (1.e-3*$0):($4) and splot "testRigibody.mov" using 2:3:4

Here you can find some screenshots of the gnuplot output:

I haven't completed step 2 yet, I will do it in the next few days.

Waiting for your reply. Thanks!