An important facet of successful engineering is having the right tools. A lot of specialized tools already exist. One would most likely use some version of Spice to perform analog simulation and, of course, most digital designers know Verilog or VHDL. However, in many cases you often have to build your own tools.
Matlab is a widely known, widely used, and excellent tool development language. Unfortunately, it is also expensive, and many of my readers do not have access to a legal copy. (The MathWorks gets you hooked in college with the cheap student version, and once you’re out in the industry, they ask you to cough up the dough!)
I am fond of modeling with Excel and have used it to analyze data collected from my system. I have also built worksheets for transformer design, filter design, and other particular problems. Everyone has access to spreadsheet software, and I am impressed that this is a tool universally used by both technical and business people. An excellent book on technical Excel applications is Excel by Example by Aubrey Kagan (Elsevier isbn: 0-7506-7756-2).
The main problem I have with Excel is that each cell can either be an input or an output. This can make it hard to solve circular dependencies. Just try solving “A=2·B.” You can set up A to be a function of B or B to be a function of A, but not both.
I thought C# might be a good language for rapid tool development, but I am not happy that it is heavily tied to a particular operating system. I also found out that the correct operation of an app depends on your users having compatible versions of interface software.
My software friends tell me that updating this software is free and not difficult. My response is that updating works only if you have administrator privileges on your computer and access to the Internet. Administrator access is not guaranteed at large companies, and I learned the hard way about Internet access when I was training 100 distribution field application engineers at an Internet-challenged hotel.
I have been attracted to HTML and JavaScript because they are used with every browser on most commercial operating systems. Typically, there is no need to download anything. What I dislike, however, is the difficulty of getting an application to work with all browsers—that is, until I heard about jQuery.
Back in 2005, John Resig developed jQuery with the goal of being able to write Web applications and have them work with all the major browsers, all without further tinkering or fussing. The result was a free downloadable library that greatly simplifies the interface between HTLM and JavaScript. I will show this in the example below.
Resistance, Capacitance And Frequency, Oh My!
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