Tuesday, May 5, 2020

Next course on simulation of magnetics

It has been a while since I blogged. Nowadays I am not doing much dev with respect to the circuit simulator. Most of my time is spent in writing my next book on using Python for digital filtering for power engineering and in creating my next course on simulation of transformers using Python Power Electronics. So this blog will be about my writing and my next video course.

The book on digital signal processing using Python is based on the Udemy course Basics of Digital Signal Processing for Power Engineers:
https://www.udemy.com/course/basics-of-digital-signal-processing-for-power-engineers/

While creating the course, I put together the course material (what I would be talking about) for every lecture as just a text file. The idea was to build a story for the course - lecture by lecture, section by section. At the end of the course, I found that the text file was close to 100 pages. This was without any diagrams, simulation results or additional. It seemed a waste to this let this course material be as is as the course itself has become a bestseller on Udemy. So, I started putting this text file together as a book and so far have written four chapters and 117 pages. Another two chapters are remaining after which I will write the introduction and conclusion. And then the hunt for a publisher.

My main objective behind publishing is to write books that are easy to read and break hard-core engineering down into simple understandable text. Another major feature of the book is that all references will be open links - primarily Wikipedia. I am a supported of Wikipedia and use Wikipedia links heavily in my online teaching as well.

The next online course is based on magnetics primarily simulating transformers. Though it is a well reported topic, my reason for digging into it was that in terms of implementation, transformers and magnetics in general are tackled fairly heuristically - mainly by just trial and error. The objective of the course is to bring this entire topic down to basic physics - Faraday's Law, Lenz's, Ampere's Law. In the future, my advanced courses will use magnetics particularly multi-winding transformers and therefore, this course is an introduction to that.

Gradually, the process of creating video courses is becoming far easier and quite enjoyable. The initial agony in filtering out noise from videos is now a thing I laugh about. A decent noise canceling mic is fairly important for recording. My very first course was recorded with a mobile phone headset. I had to wrap myself in a blanket to shield myself from noise as it picked up everything not just in the apartment but in the entire neighbourhood. I had Audacity setup for amplifying audio and removing whatever little noise that remains. I still end up with a minor background hum but I would not worry about that.

With that said, I would like to see how long it takes to record my next course. I have recorded and uploaded 3 hours and 48 minutes of video lectures already in 5 days. At this rate, if all goes well, I should be done by the end of May.