Co-authored by co-instructors Jason K. Moore and Kenneth Lyons. Course Description Introduction to Mechanical Vibrations is a 30+ year old upper level elective in the mechanical engineering curriculum at the University of California, Davis. It is a classic mechanical engineering course that stems from the courses and books of Timoshenko …

Many instructors that teach modeling and simulation topics in a variety of domains are turning to computational thinking and active learning in their classrooms. In particular, the Jupyter Notebook platform is being rapidly adopted by instructors worldwide to deliver interactive instructional content to students. The Jupyter Notebook arose from the …

I had the pleasure of reviewing Amit Saha's book "Doing Math with Python" over the Christmas break and this post contains the email I sent to Amit. Amit, I had a chance to go through the book today. I really enjoyed it and think you've done a great job with …

I'm working on using direct collocation and nonlinear programming for system/parameter identification. This requires evaluating a vector of constraint equations and it's sparse Jacobian. When there are thousands of collocation nodes and a fair number of model states the equations need to be evaluated on the order of a …

PyCon 2014 in Montreal was a fabulous conference. I'm blown away by the Python community everytime I go to the various flavors of Python conferences. They are just plain fun. The talks are superb. I learns tons. The people are inspiring. I love the fact that the last half of …

I've been working on implementing a walking simulation model that is based on and compatible with a model developed by my PI, Ton van den Bogert, in http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jbiomech.2009.12.012. Ton provided me with source code that that derives the equations of …

I wrote up a last minute PyCon 2014 proposal last night at 11:30 and pressed save at 24:00...which was too late. Here are the details so I can save it for another time. I did manage to submit a tutorial on PyDy, but I think that has …

Blog post on creating a new interface to test different controller designs for the Double Pendulum Robot.

Yumi and I just got back from a month long bicycle tour of Japan. We took two cameras with us. My Panasonic Lumix stopped autofocusing the first day of the trip, so we used her Canon Powershot for all the photographing. We dropped the Canon twice on the trip and …

/** * HTML5 ✰ Boilerplate * * style.css contains a reset, font normalization and some base styles. * * Credit is left where credit is due. * Much inspiration was taken from these projects: * - yui.yahooapis.com/2.8.1/build/base/base.css * - camendesign.com/design/ * - praegnanz.de/weblog/htmlcssjs-kickstart */ /** * html5doctor.com Reset Stylesheet (Eric Meyer's …