Control Engineering - College

[issler]

Welcome folks, to the arcane world of engineering.

The main purpose of this post is to make a log of my current college progress and, of course, to discuss control engineering and its many applications, as well as other forms of engineering.

I'm making this to be sort of a 'free thread' but, please, there are a few guidelines I expect people to follow:
-Don't get too off-topic, the main discussion here is and math/scientific learning and its many applications.
-Forum rules








Some random quotes about the qualities I consider to be the pillars of true science and engineering.
incredulity, skepticism, atheism:
--All religions are created by men, god is a myth.
--There is no fate, but accidents misnamed.
--Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by the rulers as useful.
--Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
--Believe nothing, no matter where you read it or who has said it, not even if I have said it, unless it agrees with your own reason, and your own common sense.
--Do not pass by my epitaph, traveler.
But having stopped, listen and learn, then go your way.
There is no boat in Hades, no ferryman Charon,
No caretaker Aiakos, no dog Cerberus.
All we who are dead below
Have become bones and ashes, but nothing else.
I have spoken to you honestly, go on, traveler,
Lest even while dead I seem talkative to you."


hard-work, talent, intelligence:
--Hard work without talent is a shame, but talent without hard work is a tragedy.
--You have to put in many, many, many tiny efforts that nobody sees or appreciates before you achieve anything worthwhile.
--An intelligent person is never afraid or ashamed to find errors in his understanding of things.
--Knowledge is often mistaken for intelligence. This is like mistaking a cup of milk for a cow.
--I would much rather have people think I'm stupid, and shock them, than have people think I'm smart, and disappoint them.
--Common sense is not so common.


courage, purpose, determination:
--One man with courage is a majority.
--If youre hated, youre doing something right.
--The purpose of life is a life of purpose.
--The soul which has no fixed purpose in life is lost; to be everywhere, is to be nowhere.
--Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
--Live your beliefs and you can turn the world around.
--If you don't have time to do it right, when will you have time to do it over?
--We must remember that one determined person can make a significant difference, and that a small group of determined people can change the course of history.
--Many of the great achievements of the world were accomplished by tired and discouraged men who kept on working.










MY LAST UNDERTAKING:
Learning about waves(physics) and their relation to ordinary differential equations. Simple harmonic movement, Pendulum, Progressive waves, stationary waves, doppler effect, interference.

MY CURRENT UNDERTAKING:
Learning to code in C, I have to know to program almost fluently with dev C++ by the 26th's sunset. Repetition, Pointers, Reading information from files, Vectors(arrays), Matrices.

MY NEXT UNDERTAKING:
Revising Linear Algebra and continuing my study of Multivariable Calculus, do a few algebra exercises and move on. Diagonalization, Matrix Similarity, Linear transformation matrices, Change of basis, LDU decomposition.











FOR THE INDEPENDENT LEARNER, useful references:
Youtube search: 'khan academy', 'indian institutes of technology'
Google search: 'MIT open course ware'
To download any book, just google search: " 'book name' pdf free download "





WE'RE GOING TO MAKE A DENT IN THE UNIVERSE.

[Sphere]

Well at least you are humble.

[Gaidin]

as well as other forms of engineering.

In senior Electrical Engineering Theory courses right now. I call them Theory, because they're the courses that every EE major at the college is required to take, though they are of course very application.

The harsh one is Signals and Systems. If you're not used to it, Fourier Transforms can throw you for a big loop, especially if you have a professor who likes to make his tests very mathematical theory heavy.



Also, you will find C a very useful language for learning to program. My college's computer science tried to switch it's base programming course to Python in an effort to focus more on algorithm learning. It pissed every other department off as every other department required that course. And they never asked for a different course because C promoted the fine control of variables and resources that a language like Python handles automatically. The Comp Sci department was 'convinced' after one semester to switch back.

[John Doe]

Also, you will find C a very useful language for learning to program. My college's computer science tried to switch it's base programming course to Python in an effort to focus more on algorithm learning. It pissed every other department off as every other department required that course. And they never asked for a different course because C promoted the fine control of variables and resources that a language like Python handles automatically. The Comp Sci department was 'convinced' after one semester to switch back.

I will agree with that, but I think you should also learn how to program in visual basic for microsoft Excel, that software is very powerful and will be very beneficial for a non-programming ingenier. Also the software Labview might be useful, I used it in the late 90s, and I was really impressed by it.

[Sphere]

Fourier Transforms are ing amazing though. Mathematical order out of near chaos.



I was introduced to them in structural dynamics, particularly earthquake and vibration design. There is something tremendously beautiful about it , both aesthetically(when you plot out the component graphs) and intellectually (getting a workable mathematical model from very complicated data).

[Mythos]

Fourier, Laplace, z-transforms are the basis of modern civilisation. Without them the complexity of systems we could achieve and reliably manage would be very low.

[issler]

I'm almost at fourier series, I'm almost civilized.
But right now, really, I'm learning to code in C. All control applications (e.g. robots) are coded in C.
There's a hard drive one can program, called Arduino, whose language derives from C.
All very nice =D.
You imagine, SolidWorks and servomotors do for you, all coded in C.

Part of my assignment was to write a program to solve 2nd order ODE's, the other was to code it to solve Harmonic Movement and resonance problems. It was all related, very instructional.
To me, college should be like that, as interdisciplinary as possible.
This was an exception since most of my assignments are completely unrelated. It's no wonder really folks can't associate what they've learned later on, most at least not without making extra-courses, like getting a Master's Degree or having to take a sabbatical.

EDIT 1: @Mythos I wouldn't go as far as calling it the "basis of modern civilisation" because modernity is much more philosophical than anything else, mainly because it took much more guts and brainpower for people to free themselves from a king of France than to develop a mathematical theory.
I mean Laplace was certainly smart, but that's an overstatement.

[Mythos]

Modern technical civilisation at any rate.

[issler]

Modern technical civilisation at any rate.

i know i was just being pretentious


EDIT1: @John Doe 95% of Control Engineering's applications are in C. I'll learn C and, then, see what I'm going to do.

[Roboute Guilliman]

I hated having to do fourrier transformation in math and my systems & signals class.

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[Sphere]

Obvious bot is obvious.

But anyways, when Fourier proposed that any function could be written as a series of sines and cosine terms, the "Great Man" of the day, Lagrange, ridiculed Fourier declaring that his idea was completely obsurd and wrong.

Not only was Fourier proven right, his namesake transform is today an incredible useful and important tool. Just a lesson in the fallibility of authority.