FAST feature request

Wind & Water Computer-Aided Engineering Software Tools
1

Dear Jason,
Dear Marshall,
I use FAST since 2008 and at the moment I missing an important feature: the option to specify via a parameter in the FAST .inp file a custom .dll controller instead of the standard GH Bladed name DISCON.dll.
This parameter will allow to specify for example “MyControllerInterface.dll” as linked controller library, and at least in my case will save the user from headache when organizing different versions of controller. Will be great if also some sort of custom file path could be specified.
This parameter should be ignored if the control is all internal to FAST but will be used in case of “user-def function” is selected for some input control.

I was thinking about modifing the code myself but I don’t have your compiler available and with free tools the performance of the generated FAST.exe are worst than the official FAST… also you probably better know how to make this mod really consistent with FAST further development.

I will wait for any news in this direction.

As usual thank you for your effort,

Cheers,
Stefano

2

Dear Stefano,

Thanks for the feedback.

The name and path of the controller DLL can currently be set at compile time via the parameters available in MODULE BladedDLLParameters() of source file BladedDLLInterface.f90. When we get the chance, we have plans to make the DLL interface a built-in option in FAST, in which case the DLL parameters will become inputs that can be defined from an input file.

Best regards,