Hello,
From my memory, this is my first post. I may have made some posts a few years ago under a different username but lets call it my first post...
In the past few days I have designed a simple project that allows a student (electrical apprentice) to twist some pots and change relationships and magnitudes of sine waves and view the resultant waveform. In time, students will be able to plug into this small resistors, inductors (yes, AC, I know) and capacitors to 'see' how different load types affect the demand on AC power supplies.
The next step in the learning process is to use a cartesian plane to represent these sine waves and subsequently make it easier to throw some math at them.
I would like to see a Cartesian Plane interface that allows several key features:
- Associated 'cartesian' library: examples;
- Cartesian.plot(X,Y); - Plot individual points
- Cartesian.path(X,Y,X,Y); - Provides means for vectors
- Cartesian.label(X,Y); - Label both X and Y axis
- Cartesian.title(); - Add a meaningful title
- Cartesian.clear(); - Clears entire plane OR enter single/multiple coordinates to clear individual points or even vectors.
It would be sensational for a visual representation of phase currents in a multi phase installation. I have currently been doing this with excel using a ton of visual basic however it fails to provide a 'real time' representation as I can not connect the real world to excel (and industry specific equipment is just too expensive for small colleges). It could potentially be used to visually demonstrate the real-time interactions between accelerometers and motor drive characteristics.
The advantage of the arduino system over something like excel is that to get an output from the plotter, a student is required to manipulate something real as oppose to something virtual and wile many of us can make the connection between virtual and IRL, a lot of my students can not.
Also, I can put together a pre-fab box with a few pots, some switches, some LEDs maybe and for several dollars and a bit of time, each of my students has something they can interact with, take home and access any time with free software.
Just a thought....