Useful Freeware

Portable Hardware Info/Diagnosric Tool HWiNFO32

Following an earlier post about SIW for a software to use as a hardware detection here is a great portable alternative. HWiNFO32 Features very comprehensive hardware detection set. It can also monitor various sensors on your computer (like temperatures, voltages, etc.). Contains some basic benchmarking, which can be useful.

Overall a very useful program to have on your USB Drive.

Merry Christmas

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays! Be healthy and have lots of fun this holiday season.

Quickly Digitize Scanned Curves with Engauge Digitizer

Engauge Digitizer can help you quickly digitize scanned charts, plots and maps into numeric data. The workflow is easy to follow and includes the following steps:

1. Import an image file to digitize.
2. Pick three points on the axises to define the X and Y axis (those can be for cartesian, polar, linear and logarithmic graphs).
3. You can clean-up your image by features like automatic grid removal, and discretize. The discretize is very helpful in cleaning up the image, where you can specify various thresholds with real time preview of the image.
4. You then face two choices – manual and automatic digitizing process.
5. Finally when happy with the results – you can export the data to a .csv file to be processed with other software.

Overall I find it a very useful freeware program especially for engineers, scientists and students, where very often it is helpful to digitize data from a plot, scanned from a book. It is a powerful software with a very good set of automatic detection tools.