Short Description
Discover the theory behind today’s circuit simulators and implement it in Python
Description
Welcome to one of the very few online courses that will teach you how to develop an electrical circuit solver!
Are you interested in the theory used in most circuit simulators and how to implement it yourself?
Are you an electrical engineering student/professional wishing to develop coding skills?
Would you like to switch to a software engineering career and start with a programming project linked to electrical engineering?
If the answer to any of these questions is yes, this course is for you.
If you are a university student, you will find that this course is complementary to your curriculum.
You will discover Modified Nodal Analysis (MNA), a powerful method to solve electrical circuits. Leonhard Martin Wedepohl, a noted electrical engineering educator, emphasised that “the absence of this circuit analysis technique from many academic engineering courses is totally at variance with its widespread application in modern circuit simulation packages”. And here is where you can learn this awesome technique!
Please note that this course does not cover the development of a graphical interface for drawing electrical circuits. However, this may be your next project after completing this one!
In the theory part of this course, you will get the foundations to build a circuit solver both in time domain and frequency domain. Although the implementation only covers independent voltage sources, independent current sources and RLC elements, modelling other components will require minimal additional effort!
If you have never programmed in Python, don’t worry, we have dedicated a section to teach you how to code in Python as well as all the language concepts you need to complete this project! There are many exercises along the way before beginning the development of your circuit solver. These exercises will let you feel better ready for the real project.
You will start your program with a warmup challenge: build a DC solver in steady state. Once done, you will continue with the development of a frequency domain solver followed by a time domain solver.
During your adventure, you will learn an essential software engineering concept: version control. This will make it easier for you to monitor the progress of your development and avoid any loss of information if you screw things up or your program crashes at any time! In this course, you will use Git with GitHub (you will have to create a GitHub account -it’s free- to better understand and apply version control concepts).
The last section of this course focuses on improving the structure of your code and defining an appropriate output format for your end-user.
If, at the end of this course, you are keen to continue with this project and develop further functionalities, you will find many creative opportunities that will help you to expand your programming skills and, in addition, enable you to show up with great achievements to employers! If you need guidance, some improvement suggestions are listed in the very last lecture of this course.
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