Todays guest is Craig Brinck. The mastermind behind Pynite, my favourite structural analysis library for Python.
Craig is a Senior Structural Engineer at Carollo Engineers, based in Herriman, Utah, with a Master’s degree from the University of Utah.
During our conversation, Craig shares the story behind Pynite—how it evolved from his early experiments in Excel and VBA to a robust Python package that simplifies structural analysis.
I am a big fan of Pynite, I think it’s an incredibly useful and flexible tool for Structural Engineers. It’s free, powerful and open-source. What more could you want?
Some of my favourite features include:
Fast and easy frame analysis.
Well crafted functions and methods to build models quickly and gain insights.
Great Documentation.
Visualizations and Plotting.
Whether you're dealing with beams, columns, or plates, Pynite is designed to be a lean and accessible tool for engineers who want to dive deep into finite element analysis without the licensing requirements of commercial software.
It’s an open book, with fully visible source code.
It was a very interesting discussion for me personally, since I’ve been using Pynite myself for a number of years and have always looked forward to discussing it with Craig.
Craig has extended an open invite to the Flocode Community to assist in the maintenance and future development of Pynite.
If you are interested or have some ideas, changes or practical examples you would like to share, make sure to open up the discussion at:
https://github.com/JWock82/PyNite/discussions
I plan to share some more of my own insights on Pynite soon.
Thank you for being a part of Flocode.
See you in the next one.
James 🌊
#042 - Flocode Podcast 🌊 | Craig Brinck - Pynite and Finite Element Analysis in Python