Hey guys, please forgive me for putting this question in the homework section. But this has become for me, my lil home away from home. I trust the advisors here and you know the type of course content I cover best. So it's your advice I seek and desire most.

I have decided that it's time for me to enter the world of the graphing calculator. Yes indeed!
Way past time, if my opinion were sought...
I'm up to my eyes in course work here and I have decided, dang it! I will have me a graphing calculator.

Now the course I'm studying is - a degree in Electrical and electronic engineering. My budget isn't great but I do want something, that's going to cover the type of content I need to finish my degree, without a massive learning curve.

Any suggestions would be great.

Yours sincerely and apologetically
Kevin

 

Any decent scientific calculator should be more than sufficient to get you through your degree. I've never owned or operated a graphing calculator in my life. Your time and energy are probably better spent learning how to make effective use of a spreadsheet program's capabilities.

 

Ditto. It would be unusual in my opinion to do much serious work on a calculator, as opposed to a spreadsheet. Some courses do require a graphing calculator, but that’s the only time you’ll use it.

If you have a smartphone, there’s probably an app that’s better than any calculator you can buy.

 

A graphing calculator will not necessarily do away with polarrectangular conversions, and you certainly need to know how to do them.
I think that graphing calculators are rather a fad and are not a particularly good engineering tool.

The best calculator I ever had was an HP42, but unfortunately they don't make them any more.
It could directly do calculations with complex imaginary numbers, for example.

So just get a good scientific calculator and that should be sufficient.
I prefer HP calculators, since I find RPN (Reverse Polish Notation) easier to use when entering long equations, as compared to standard algebraic notation. It works the same way as you do calculations on paper. The HP35s looks fairly competent.

I have an app for a very complete virtual calculator on my Windows computer that I use all the time. It has far more functions than any real calculator I've seen.
I'll post it later, if I can.

 

Really? Whao ok... well there's a shock. Wasn't expecting that. I've a decent smart phone, a Samsung j3 and a fairly good Toshiba satellite laptop with Windows 10 on it.
I've got a scientific calculator, it can convert from polar to Cartesian but it can't calculate them.
Believe me I can do it manually at this stage...
I'm doing transmission line analysis atm. Nominal pi models. Sending receiving voltages, current, power. Voltage regulation / efficiency.
Per unit system for power systems... and a few other goodies.

A spreadsheet Wbahn? I'm probably going to sound like a complete n00b here, but the only spreadsheet package I've ever used, is excel. I don't think it's the type of spreadsheet you have in mind, but I've dabbled with MATLAB. I have to go into the uni to use it however, and I really need to work from home.

 

So it would seem you want a calculator that can calculate complex numbers.
Google lists several that apparently do that.

Here's a section of the HP35s manual showing how to perform complex calculations in either polar or rectangular format.

And here's a description of doing it on a TI-83/84 (these are graphing calculators if you really want that, although more expensive than the HP).

Casio also has a number of calculators that perform complex number calculations such as models fx-991MS fx-115MS fx-912MS fx-3650P and fx-3950P, with several being quite inexpensive.

 

Crutschow, you're a genius. I think it might be even legal for me to take that Hp into my exam... now there's a thought. Kk I'll have to look into that. In the meantime I've started to investigate excel.

 

Crutschow, you're a genius. I think it might be even legal for me to take that Hp into my exam... now there's a thought. Kk I'll have to look into that. In the meantime I've started to investigate excel.

One of the many advantages of a spreadsheet (or notebook such as Mathematica) is that it can be worked on incrementally over long periods of time, and shared with others if needed. I have several I started over a decade ago and continue to expand and refine to this day.

 

Crutschow, you're a genius. I think it might be even legal for me to take that Hp into my exam... now there's a thought. Kk I'll have to look into that. In the meantime I've started to investigate excel.

You should also be aware that LibreOffice has a very capable spreadsheet program and it is free to boot. I recommend you take it for a test drive because even if you have a copy of Excel at little or no cost, you're going to be tagged for the cost of an upgrade at some point. As a student you might want to consider getting off the "pay for an upgrade" bandwagon now. I went back to school for a second Master's Degree in Financial Engineering and the LO spreadsheet was more than adequate for financial models and the pricing of exotic derivative securities.

https://www.libreoffice.org/download/download/

 

HI,

If you are allowed to use a calculator during your test exams then a calculator can do wonders because you can check all your results using the calculator and some program that you may even write yourself.

TI makes some good calcs, but when i went from the TI-86 (much loved calc) to the TI-89 i was very disappointed to find that they removed the ability to use upper case and lower case variable names. The TI-86 allowed names such as MyVar, MyVar2, etc., but the TI-89 only allows myvar, myvar2, as upper case dont stay upper case. What a huge mistake that was in this day and age or even when it was first made back then.

The newer calcs like this could help a lot because many of them can do advanced math like Laplace Transforms and Inverse Laplace. In a test exam that would do wonders because you could check all your resutls.

Even better though would be a Laptop. A Laptop computer would allow you to use symbolic algebra software which is very valuable. Of course you would have to check to see if you are allowed to use it during tests.

Today i'd be almost lost without my software, and even back in the 1980's i used some software to do the more complicated problems and proofs.

 

Oh my... I feel a little like Hubble. I've just discovered there's a whole universe out there,I didn't know about.
Ok perhaps some extra information would be good. Focussing on the spreadsheet thing here. I'm a fan of MS office wasn't always a big windows fan but love windows 10.
We get office for free as part of our uni packagè and to be honest I think I'll always have a copy of Ms office. I've tested some of libre's other office packages and wasn't happy. Never their spreadsheet package. But let's just say I think I'm always going to want a copy of office.
But how useful and powerful can excel be to me in the field of electronics? I don't want to waste hundreds of hours, if it will fail me at some point.
I've done some quick research into mathematica vs MATLAB. Our university is pushing MATLAB at us. I've been told it may feature in some of the 4th year projects. I have to do a small assignment with it using the - power toolbox features for power transission analysis. So should I go down that road? Apparently it's not with symbolic operations. But how important is that for me? Then there's other people saying python is free. Sounds like a big learning curve however.
I need to get off the starting blocks running so I think I'd rule out python.

Ok let me phrase it like this. If I mastered excel and had a decent knowledge of MATLAB. How much content could I cover?
And if I only had knowledge of excel how much content could I cover?

 

Really? Whao ok... well there's a shock. Wasn't expecting that. I've a decent smart phone, a Samsung j3 and a fairly good Toshiba satellite laptop with Windows 10 on it.
I've got a scientific calculator, it can convert from polar to Cartesian but it can't calculate them.
Believe me I can do it manually at this stage...
I'm doing transmission line analysis atm. Nominal pi models. Sending receiving voltages, current, power. Voltage regulation / efficiency.
Per unit system for power systems... and a few other goodies.

A spreadsheet Wbahn? I'm probably going to sound like a complete n00b here, but the only spreadsheet package I've ever used, is excel. I don't think it's the type of spreadsheet you have in mind, but I've dabbled with MATLAB. I have to go into the uni to use it however, and I really need to work from home.

Excel is what I use -- you probably have only scratched the surface of what you can do with it. I've gotten pretty accomplished at doing some pretty sophisticated things with it and I know that I've barely put a dent as far as using it's power.

Another tool that is very useful is Python. Back when I was teaching Transform Methods I was doing a lot of work with complex numbers and fairly complex circuits so I wrote a bunch of functions that let me enter data in terms of L,R,C values as well as Z values plus combine them in series and parallel combinations and also to compute voltages and currents for the basic topologies (a single Z plus a voltage divider and a current divider, IIRC) and to print out values in a presentable fashion. Because it is interpreted, I only have to run it once and then all of the functions are available to me at the command line. Made things very easy and convenient. Took perhaps two hours to write (since most of the functions are just one or two lines of code).

 

Ok let me phrase it like this. If I mastered excel and had a decent knowledge of MATLAB. How much content could I cover?
And if I only had knowledge of excel how much content could I cover?

Pretty much all of it.

Remember, it wasn't that long ago that an electrical engineering student had as their only computing device a slide rule and, when all is said and done, what you learn today isn't that different from what they learned back then.

If I had a choice of only knowing Excel or only knowing MATLAB, I would choose Excel. There are certainly many very useful tasks that MATLAB is a far superior tool for, but the huge range of things that a spreadsheet can be useful for and is a far better choice is on a whole different level. Now, depending on what you end up focusing on that claim may stop being true at some point as I know people that spend the majority of their day working with MATLAB (or Mathematica or some similar tool), but I know far more people that never use one of them or only rarely (me being one of them), yet I don't know of anyone that I work with that doesn't use a spreadsheet program on a very regular basis.

But you don't have to choose just one or the other. Learn to use both. Put as many tools into your tool bag as you can so that you choose the proper tool for the task at hand -- and always be trying to learn to use all of your tools better all the time.

 

For spreadsheets, one can use excel if you have access to it. An alternative is to use Google sheets, which covers essentially the same functionality and also allows real-time sharing with others if desired.

For calculators, the main motivator is that you can use it in an exam. When my son was needing to get a "graphing calculator", I found it preposterous to buy something that is *only* a calculator when you could get a low-end smartphone for essentially the same price. (Personally, I keep the HP 48 emulator app on my phone - Droid48 - though I wouldn't use it for graphing - too clumsy!) We realized, however, that the calculator is needed because a smartphone/tablet/laptop will not be allowed in an exam, but the graphing calculator is, and some exam questions are specifically addressed at using a graphing functionality (speaking of AP calc exams, SAT/ACT exams, etc).

For Matlab/Mathematica/Mathcad/Python/etc, I used Mathcad back in the 80's before learning Matlab and have used Matlab - or its free cousin Octave - ever since. At my work, we have more than a hundreds seats of Matlab but still often run out, so I don't bother opening Matlab and go straight to Octave by default. At home, I have Octave installed under cygwin on Windows (you can also install it without cygwin) and installed directly on Mac. My son uses Octave on cygwin regularly for his AP calc and science homework rather than pulling out his TI graphing calculator. Python is a nice, object-oriented platform with a crazy number of packages for everything from linear algebra to port banging. If you need to do something in a script, it's probably already done in a free Python package. It can be interfaced with C/C++ programs, works well for instrument control and analysis, and has a nice packaging paradigm. That said, it is a steeper learning curve and more opaque than Matlab/Octave, IMO.

My recommendation is to get a used TI 84-89 from CL or ebay for the exam aspects, if applicable. You should also get familiar with at least the basics of excel and/or Google sheets. Finally, get some mileage on scripting with Matlab/Octave and separately with Python. These scripting skills are more likely to open doors for you than experience with spreadsheets from a resume/interview POV.

 

If I mastered excel...

Good luck with that! I've used it almost daily since before version 1.0 (1985?), over a very wide range of tasks in science and business, but I'd be embarrassed to call myself a "master", because I know there will always be tricks I haven't even dreamed of. I can do a lot with Excel but I'm constantly amazed by the tricks and tips you can find online to accomplish various things.. It's incredibly versatile and almost limitless when extended with its built-in Visual Basic.

I think my approach through the years was to start every project in Excel and only reach for other tools like Mathematica, statistical software, neural networks, or whatever if/when I became convinced that the tools in Excel were simply not enough. For one thing, all my colleagues and customers could use Excel files and none of them had those other special tools.

 

Hi,

I had spreadsheets in the past and didnt like them. I think it was because they force you to do things in a certain way. Then there was the copy cells thing, if you needed the same formula in other cells. Just didnt like that or the squarish world it forces you into.

I moved to custom programming using a simplified language. I stated with BASIC because it was available at home and at work, then i moved to a custom language i created that is similar to Pascal, then on to another language that is a sub set of C and have been using that ever since mostly because it's fairly straightforward and easy to debug compared to other languages.
Anyway, in that kind of language you can do just about anything you want to do. Create libs for junctions you use all the time, etc. It also allows windows programming (via the Win API) so you can make custom programs to do certain things either for use or for a nice demonstration. I made one once that did a full wave rectifier solution once that allowed the user to select spice model diodes and capacitors and stuff like that. At the time we were looking at the comparison between simplified ripple calculations and a spice calculation.
Complex quantities, integration, even symbolic algebra, all possible if you are willing to write your own programs. You can even program a spreadsheet
My most recent program worth mentioning is a symbolic circuit analysis program.

 

Whao ok guys... you'e given me a lot to think about.
Today has been quite a voyage of descovery. Imagine it... lil excel, sitting there on my desktop, like an worn out piece of graph paper and all this time, yet its been pretty much thee most powerful tool on my laptop. That's some Yoda shiz right there is what it is.

Ok so how to learn how to use it as electrical engineer? I've found a few random YouTube videos, and websites though nothing very specific or substantial. As I say I kind of need to start of running. I'm sure you guys maybe have some great resources, more geared toward the functions I need to learn.

 

Ok so how to learn how to use it as electrical engineer?

One baby step at a time is the only advice I can give, whether it’s Excel or any other tool. Force yourself to use it for some chore, and learn one specific task. Maybe linear regression curve fitting, or just sorting a list, finding the mean of a data set, or plotting a function. Whatever you need, assume you can do it with Excel until you prove otherwise. I think you’ll be surprised.

 

I saw a video on complex number operations. None on phasors/polar calculations, though there are a few on designing spiral curves and things, so I'm assuming excel can do phasors without a problem. I've been working so I've just had a look at some vids and sites on my free time today. But I'm gonna open that bad boy tomorrow and start using it. The only way to learn as you suggest....

 

Does Excel have a function to convert rectangular to polar and back?