The latest release of the Palm OS electrical and electronic engineering calculator entitled "Electrist" from Red Binary Development adds many new features to the existing set of electrical, electronic, and radio engineering calculations. Most notable is the addition of three new formula groups which help with 3 phase calculations and extend the software further into the industrial market. A 10 use trial can be found on the company's website. The full version costs $20 USD from the same website.The new 3 phase load balance calculator will accept parameters for any number of loads input as wattage or volt-amps.
The wiring configuration for each load uses a pop-up menu to select which legs the load is tied into, which also designates it as a single- or three-phase load.
The transformer can be designated as either delta or wye wired and the results for both phase and line can be viewed as current, wattage, or volt-amps.Other 3 phase additions include the voltage unbalance calculator, which allows figuring voltage unbalance factors using both the NEMA and IEC negative sequence formulas, and the 3 phase power calculator for calculating both true and apparent power.Also new in this release are the additions of parallel impedance and impedance current calculators, as well as some general user interface upgrades and housekeeping.Existing funtions that can be performed include Ohm's Law, Watt's Law, resistor value, series or parallel resistance, inductance, and capacitance, voltage and current divider networks, reactance, sine wave conversions, resonant frequency, periodic wave characteristics, decibels, VSWR, delta and wye resistance conversion, RL and RC time constants, and cost of energy use over time as well as a built-in calculator that can convert between conductor sizes specified in AWG, metric, and circular mils.Electrist has been available for 2 years and in that time has grown to become the predominant software of its kind on the market, garnering 5 star reviews from users at the PalmOne, PalmSource, Handango, and PalmGear web sites as well as the "Palm Boulevard Best" award and counts users at such institutions as the NASA Dryden Flight Research Center, Sandia National Laboratories, and the Harvard Physics Department among it's client base.
