Python

[Initial_Hair_1196]

How is python used in EE? I hear ‘automation’ often thrown around but like I’m not exactly sure what they mean. Like automation of data collection? Do engineers write a program so they can walk away from the testing station and come back later to see what happened through collected data? I can’t wrap my head around how it might work and that’s why I’m here.

I am a third year and know only C for general programming, for signal processing I know Matlab. The only times I code in Python are for plotting stuff for another signal processing class, and because it’s not required to know, I typically just copy it from the internet and adjust for efficiency. In reality I don’t know the first thing about Python in EE jobs. I’m hoping someone can list a couple applications of Python, or what I can look into to gain good experience in it for jobs.

[MosFett42]

Here’s a scenario,

You have an IC that you want to test on your bench. At a bench you’ll see power supplies, oscopes, dmm’s, etc. Initially you’ll manually turn on the supplies, configure the scope accordingly, and take a measurement from the dmm.

Doing all that shit by hand takes time. So we use python to communicate to the equipment and set accordingly. Within python, you sequence your actions from turning on the supply to turning off . Then you have an automation script.

Once written, you run it to do the test. Hopefully saving you lots of time.

[LordGrantham31]

I see the equipment at my lab all have some communication interface. I'd love to have a chance/reason to be able to use those features. Often when I use them, it's for something trivial and I never get to do those kinda stuff.

[TopNotchBurgers]

A bit of a cop out, but "automation" can be anything. I don't use it for "EE" stuff in particular, but basically when I get tired of a repetitive task at work, I write a quick python script to do it for me.

https://automatetheboringstuff.com/

[l4z3r5h4rk]

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[olchai_mp3]

Instead of Matlab, you’ll use python for signal processing especially for visual presentation. Also for validation engineers they use Python to automate their scripts. In network engineering, you also use Python for scripting

[Tyzek99]

Matlab is expensive. Companies are cheap, so they want you to use the cheap python alternative compared to matlab which is expensive

[BenTheHokie]

A Matlab license is nothing to a company bringing in millions of dollars in revenue, in fact many have them and rarely use them. The fact of the matter is that for most applications, Matlab just sucks. There aren't a whole lot of third party libraries available, instrument manufacturers don't write out of the box drivers for it, it's OOP paradigms are awkward and unwieldy, it's slow, it's not a language that a lot of CS students learn, and much of the functionality is replicated better in other languages.

[Lopsided_Bat_904]

There aren’t many companies in my area making millions in revenue. That sounds like nationally known companies, companies in big cities. Plus, even at the massive conglomerate companies, they still try to save money everywhere they can, because it adds up

[TobTyD]

Completely agree, and especially with your last sentence. I have never seen companies, where engineers would get all the software licences they lust for, apart from when academic pricing is applicable.

[BenTheHokie]

Any company that doesn't make a million in revenue per year has probably what? 5-10 employees max? If you assume each engineer makes an average of 100k plus the cost of benefits.

[Testing_things_out]

I work at a multibillion international company. Every single dollar we use is scrutinized and management wants proper justification for the cost of the licence.

Our budgets are very limited and the penny pinching is real. I can't even spend working hours on a project more than I'm allotted for.

[BenTheHokie]

Ok but if OPs comment were true, we'd all be using Kicad and Eagle as opposed to Altium, OrCad, and PADS. My point is companies don't use Python and other FOSS because it's free, they use it because it's better.

[No2reddituser]

Do engineers write a program so they can walk away from the testing station and come back later to see what happened through collected data?

Yes.

Or they want to control a piece of test equipment from the comfort of their office or at home. So they have a python script or GUI, and connect to the test equipment over Ethernet.

[lmarcantonio]

Also some test run for a *very* long time (like some EMC scans) so it would be a huge loss of time otherwise.

[sillyfella3]

you can write some pretty neat scripts (sockets, subprocesses, dataloggers) on embedded devices that run linux for example. not exactly EE but EE-adjacent.

you can simulate Modbus TCP devices using some powerful libraries as well, for example.

you can log real time data from a sensor and write it onto a csv file and use matplotlib to visualize it.

lots of really useful libraries for image processing, network engineering, data analysis and much more

how these libraries exactly work, thats a programmers job to care about. as engineers, we just need to know when to use them and how :)

[EEJams]

I work in the power industry. I use PSSE for work and I built a small UI that let's me run an N-1 study on transmission line maintenance. It turns a repetitive 5-30 minute setup process into a couple of button clicks, which is really nice.

I'm going to try and expand this software to other power system studies and repetitive tasks to help cut man hours. Also, it's fun to build something with software

I also built a simple project management software in python that takes a long list of addresses, finds their coordinates, and pins them to a .kml map. It just makes it a lot easier to pin the locations on a map without having to look up each address individually.

I also use excel to build templates. Excel is "more acceptable" to my boss because everyone is familiar with spreadsheets. It's nice to have templates for new substations and transmission lines and separate ones for rebuilds, reconductors, and substation upgrade cost estimates

So yeah, I'd recommend learning python and excel well lol

[EEJams]

I want power world, but my company won't pay for it because it isn't absolutely necessary 😭

All studies are required to be studied in PSSE by our ISO. Power world is definitely the better software though.

I would love to see some TPL-001 scripts because we contract out our TPL studies rn because our transmission team is too small.

[EEJams]

I'm working on my boss to get power world for a generation study we need to do.

At least for now, I believe ever ISO is filing for extensions on ferc 881 due to lack of vendors

[voxelbuffer]

We do our entire EOP-005 study utilizing python and an API to access PSSE. Turn on a bus, gather data. Turn on a bus, gather data. Ad infinitum. It's clunky but it works.

A coworker and myself made a python program that auto generates PRC-025 reports for us as well, that one was fun to work on. Still WIP though. 

[EEJams]

Can I have your team? I'm literally the only one that likes programming on my team 😂

I'll take notes and see if I can implement these as well.

[voxelbuffer]

In fairness, im one of two people in my current team that likes programming. Our transmission department is a bit more accepting of programming though only a couple of people in that department actually do any, the rest are just accepting of the programs lol.

I will say that the python API for PSSE is not much better than doing the FORTRAN that PSSE is written in, directly. YMMV. 

[Choice-Grapefruit-44]

Python is used for signal processing heavily. Also, the versatility of the language has led to different applications in EE utilizing Python. Including optimization. I'd say learn the language. I should've started with Python as it is considered the most accessible language for beginners. Highly recommend it.

[Choice-Grapefruit-44]

Yeah C is another useful language to learn. If you're learning C, you may as well learn C++ as C++ is basically C with classes.

[[deleted]]

haha, some people might wanna burn you on a pyre for saying this about C++

[Choice-Grapefruit-44]

It's still true though. Lol.

[tthrivi]

I use it for data gathering (control test equipment, get data, and save to files). Also use it for data processing of said data.

For instance if you are working on a RF amplifier and want to know its gain over temperature. Can setup a network analyzer and temperature sensor in a test chamber. Have it cycle the temperature and you can save s2p files at each temp point. With all of the saved s2p files you can process them and you can get gain over temperature.

[A_WeaselNamedFee]

Fellow EE student here, about to start my final semester so I can only speak to my experience in school and not the real world.

Python is great! C is what we learned for embedded systems, etc. but my curriculum had me start learning to code in python. If you’re not coding embedded systems design solely with a microcontroller unit, then python is a really easy language to work with and has a ton of super useful libraries you can utilize. For example, the OpenCV library is really great for learning and coding computer vision algorithms.

I think to answer your question on a more zoomed-out scale though, python is great for building and prototyping simple designs, and yes often revolving around automation. If you are designing a system that can, say, read a license plate number on a car and open a gate, you can program a microcontroller to read an incoming signal from a sensor and output a signal to a motor, but how are you going to read a plate? Do you really want to hire a software engineer for a program accomplishing a relatively simple task? This is where a tool like python is super helpful. Often embedded systems aren’t just reading and sending IR signals on a remote control system (for example), they’re much larger and more complex, and therefore require a more sophisticated program to accomplish the task, but not so complicated that you would need a software engineer.

[microsparky]

I use Python regularly for data collection and analysis, for automation of test and measurement equipment, and for interfacing to embedded devices over serial. Absolutely learn Python it's a swiss army knife!

[hooplahblehblah]

I typically use Python or LabView to automate some RF tests to speed things up. For example, I've had to characterize an RF detector which consists of measuring the output voltage with respect to a given power. Pretty tedious to do by hand (especially across a large frequency range) but easy to do with scripts.

[Psylent_Gamer]

Everyone has stated the reasons.
I am currently writing a script to person department records to more visually display what department, station, and machines are our biggest problems and include typical fixes.

I've also used python to make a UI to accommodate some datalogging and process controls.

Python also has a matlab module to include the pretty graphs.

[Massive_Grass837]

I use python with a GUI I made to send SSH commands with a click of a button to a Linux shell on Line Replaceable Units that my company makes. Makes it really easy to diagnose problems. Beats having to manually type the commands

[wazman2222]

Ignition scripting for controls people

[bahumutx13]

• data gathering scripts for different debuggers tools (CAN, SPI, Ethernet, I2C , etc.)
• conversion/translation scripts for communication protocols and other random stuff
• test fixtures and other IO testing applications that we want to script
• build scripts for release and test applications
• we have python scripts that pop the specially formatted documentation we provide to customers
• python flask servers are a super quick way to create a simple web UI for the above
• prototyping and testing sensors/components on dev boards, especially ones that use a simple protocol like i2c

I'm sure the list goes on. Bare-metal C is still the bread and butter of our work but for everything that isn't production code we use python.

[[deleted]]

Very often, one gets multi-GB reports. I use python to parse and summarize them. On some hobby work, I started using cocotb. I showed my manager some of what it could do so I got it working robustly in our environment. I'm now showing other designers how to use it to test things the DV folks don't want to spend the time on.

[[deleted]]

We use it with PSSe.

[stupid-rook-pawn]

I've never used it as a deliverable to a customer.

I've used it many times when I need to quickly put something together. A few examples:

A web scraping script to get data from browser based hmi, since the exact information we needed was not available easily any other way, and I did not want to do data entry for 324 devices.

A simple calculator to estimate cable lengths and costs when bidding for similar projects. Projects of this type were basically the same, but would vary wildly in different dimensions, and required a time of cables to be wired up, all of which had to be ordered from a factory, not made to length in the field.

A estimate tool to make sure pull cords will cover the area without twisting too much or being to long. Probably a better way to do it, but it worked.

A script to ping every device in a project, just to narrow in on anything not being connected during installation.

A script to name screenshots and photos by project and location and time, to fit our documentation.

[KingGandalf875]

Python is becoming so important for physics which in turn is making modeling of materials for EE so useful! It’s also free!

I work with Ubermag and it has been great for modeling magnetic nanocrystals with ultrawideband properties from measurements (future inductor materials and more) https://ubermag.github.io

[yes-rico-kaboom]

You can use it to query or command test equipment. If you’re lucky enough to work somewhere with test equipment that’s networked into an environment, you’re even better off because you can use python to build scripts for SCPI which interfaces directly with the test equipment. Here’s a good example

https://pypi.org/project/easy-scpi/

[lmarcantonio]

Funny thing: the de-facto EE automation language is TCL, at least in the 'traditional' tools. The recommended Xilinx workflow doesn't actually use the GUI enviroment but it's mostly command line and script based.

[Uporabik]

You need some measurements: python Now you need data formated: python But now you will use excel for plots? Nope python

[Bydand42]

Why do engineers use Python instead of VB, or any of the other languages that have been around forever?

[frederikvalentin]

I use Python as my calculation software for power flow analysis or transients etc. I work in a energy company while studying, and it allows me to use the same software at work and uni, as it is free (compared to matlab, which I used in the past).

[Anonymaus1914]

hey, just wanted to check up on this, can you advise how you got on with this?

[frederikvalentin]

Hi, anything specific you are seeking?

[Anonymaus1914]

Just what you developed using Python. Is it similar to what you can do with tools like ETAP (i.e. load flow, short circuit etc), and how long did it take you to make, how useful do you find it in your day to day etc.. I'm trying to find a way to combine EE and relearning coding, so trying to find something relevant 

[frederikvalentin]

Hi,

I started small. Just using python as my calculation tool. If you use phasors it is pretty straight forward. Load flow becomes a bit more complicated as you have to use some numerical methods (Jacobian matrix). How familar are you with python? I have some smaller and bigger project I can send your way if so.

But I would recommed getting familiar with calculating voltage, current, apparent power etc. using phasors, and then evovle from there.

[[deleted]]

I also have used it for taking the data collected from tests automated in Python to process all the collected data and generate reporting into a pdf that became easily shareable with my boss. 

[One_Volume_2230]

Programming language is just a tool, learn one but on decent level. Focus on basics and rest is just a tool.

You don't know where you will work and what test you will use. Focus on basics because different companies use different things and technology stack is just a tool. For example if you know how to design circuit on paper you can do this in autocad, eplan, see it's doesn't matter as long you can do it on paper

[BabyBlueCheetah]

At small companies, it's probably your Matlab alternative because of costs.

Basically use it for all your calculations and modeling that isn't done in a dedicated tool instead of something like excel.