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Advanced diploma electronics at TAFE (kinda want Dave to answer this question)

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rstofer:

--- Quote from: jeremy on January 24, 2019, 10:43:51 am ---
--- Quote from: rstofer on January 24, 2019, 06:09:25 am ---The rest of the time they would be better served to use MATLAB.  It knows more about factoring and partial fractions than I'll ever know.

Octave is free and will do the same kinds of things.  I think a first semester course in MATLAB is definitely the way to go.

--- End quote ---

If I may make a humble suggestion:

If MATLAB/octave works for you, then it's great, but I (and many of my colleagues) try to ensure my students also get some experience with the python/numpy/scipy/sympy (usually through the anaconda python distribution); in particular, jupyter notebooks with all of the plotting tools built in are extraordinarily useful, and are becoming more and more common in academic literature. But the main reason is that a number of recent graduates who have gone to work for smaller businesses have told me that their managers baulked at the price of MATLAB and just said no.

Personally though, I think python is way better so I am a bit biased there...

--- End quote ---

Octave is the GNU replacement for MATLAB and it works very well plus it's free!

At the companies I worked for open source software was never used.  Not even considered!  Primarily it goes to the licensing schemes.

Engineers, OTOH, are very expensive.  In Silicon Valley, the median cost for an engineer might be $150k.  Buying a license for MATLAB is chump change, especially since it is transferable.  Negotiating a site license with a seat count (or number of open instances from a server) might be even better.  I don't know if that is available.  The cost of software tools is a deductible business expense.

To my knowledge, and it's limited, there is no analog to Simulink in Python or it's add-ons.  MATLAB itself is a great tool but when you add in the specialized toolboxes, it becomes even better.  The student edition is $99 and toolboxes are similarly discounted.  The Home edition is $149 and toolboxes tend to run around $49.

OTOH, the SymPy library looks like it may be useful. I need to study that!

There are other tools like Mathematica and Maple plus, of course, online tools like symbolab.com and desmos.com.  At some point, symbolab becomes a subscription site.  If you need detailed explanations at some level, you have to pay some nominal amount.  Not a big deal.

It pays to have a bunch of tools in your toolbox.  You never know what you might have to use.

Simulink diagram of Mass, Spring, Damper is attached and this general solution works for R-L-C circuits as well..   It is specifically organized to mimic an analog computer solution and is built up with a simple drag and drop interface.  Just drop in an integrator wherever you want!  How cool is that?  Analog computers are another way to play with differential equations!

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