Is the Exo-6 report utility broken with Nastran 2018?

I think I might be confusing things a bit... as a point of clarification- the Exo-6 is the older stand-alone program... the F06 Reader is the program delivered with the Nastran install until recently. Are we talking about the same thing? If so, then the F06 Reader is actually what I was talking about that worked with the edited log file, not the Exo-6, as I haven't messed with that any.

Right. Yes we have been talking about your newer broken F06 reader with the workaround involving the log file last line.  Also, I have been lamenting the operational loss of the fantastic exo-6 program that has been available since 2012. 

 

So from my perspective as MSC customer for the last 32 years, we have the older fantastic exo-6 reader that worked well from 2012 until 2017. Then in 2017 you released the newer crappy F06 reader, and the exo-6 became broken and failed to work with 2017 and newer.  Now for your 2018 version you provide no reader at all. So just to clarify the difference between the two different readers, I have attached a zip file with the html report produced by each reader, and you can judge for yourself. The exo-6 report was generated in a few seconds, but the F06_Reader report took about 20 seconds for the program to start due to some slow python initialization.  Just double click on the html file to see the report. This particular zip file is for a simple linear run. But the real distinction between the exo-6 and f06 reader are most apparent with nonlinear runs. The exo-6 report offers a lot more results for nonlinear runs including convergence plots.   Also, it's a shame that nobody at MSC could come up with better names for these programs.

 

The bottom line is that right now the exo-6 program works great for version 2012 up to 2017. But after that it is broken.  The F06 version is a slower, less capable tool that apparently does work up to version 2018.1, and thanks to your fix will now work for version 2018.2.  But MSC has decided to discontinue this tool and it is no longer bundled with Nastran.  I think that is the full story on these powerful Nastran tools that allow the user to quickly decipher all the important output from a Nastran run.

---

Attached Files (1)

Hi Don. So I just took some time and figured out what the problem is with the old exo-6 reader and why it stopped working after nastran 2017 was released. So now I have exo-6 working fine. The fix requires a change to the log file and also to the f04 file. The main reason that exo-6 reader stopped working with version 2017 and later is that the log file and f06 file stopped reporting memory in words and started reporting in MB. So once I figured that out, I just needed to make minor changes to my log and f04 files to get the exo-6 reader to work.

 

If I had a million dollars I would give it to MSC so you could find a programmer to fix the old exo-6 reader program and get it to work with memory in units of MB instead of words. it would probably be a quick and easy fix that would make the exo-6 program usable with all new versions of Nastran.

 

Why not provide working exo-6 and f06 reader programs to your customers so they can pick the best tool for their needs? I think that would fall under the category of providing excellent customer service, don't you. I hope to see the available for download soon.

 

Also, could you provide the source code for those tools if nobody at MSC or Hexagon has the time to fix them and maintain them?

 

Thanks.