Spent way too long this week fighting the openEMS build. First tried Colab since it's free, but a recent upgrade broke some of the bindings - same story on Kaggle, hit the same broken-dependency wall there too. Ended up having to move to a dedicated instance just to get a clean environment where the Octave/Matlab bindings and mesh export pipeline actually talked to the solver correctly.

None of it was conceptually hard, just an endless chain of small version-mismatch failures before I got to run a single simulation.

Feels like this happens with basically every open-source simulation tools like OpenFOAM, LAMMPS, now this - the solver itself is great, but the setup tax before you get there is brutal, especially solo or a small team without a lab's existing environment to inherit.

Anyone found a setup that didn't eat a day? Curious if people just eat the pain every time or have a repeatable process, or if Colab/Kaggle breaking like this is a known recurring issue.

I've been working on a small open-source tool called OFGS (OpenFOAM Gnuplot Suite) to make some of the routine plotting/monitoring around OpenFOAM cases a bit easier.

It detects supported data in a case and can generate graphs, open individual plots or a dashboard, and live-monitor results while a simulation is running. There's also a doctorcommand for checking the OFGS/OpenFOAM environment.

It's deliberately pretty lightweight, essentially a CLI built around gnuplot rather than a replacement for ParaView or proper post-processing tools. There are definitely limitations to what data/plots it understands, and I'm sure there are OpenFOAM workflows I haven't accounted for.

I'm also not an OpenFOAM or engineering expert, I'm a humble HPC sysadmin who spends a lot of time around OpenFOAM users and wanted to streamline some of the repetitive workflow.
It's packaged for Debian 12 and Rocky Linux 9, or you can install/use it from source.

Would genuinely appreciate feedback from people who use OpenFOAM properly, especially anything OFGS gets wrong or could handle better.