Quick Start

DOCUMENT

Read the document, and get to know how to use the calculator
Read the document, and get to know how to download the code.

Inspiration

I use Wolfram Alpha for all my homework.
But when I find out there's no wolfram alpha beam calculator (there's a half-baked one which doesn't help in any ways), I'm really disappointed. So for the engg assignment I have to do it myself, which is life consuming.

Today I finally got a chance to code a beam calculator and can cheat through my subsequent engg submissions. Nice.

What it does

This beam calculator takes your beam properties and gives you the free body diagram, shear force diagram, bending moment diagram and the graphing data (a csv file)

How we built it

The project was built using python standard libraries, numpy and matplotlib and nothing else. I implemented differentiation, integration an other math algorithms entirely by numpy.

Improvements to the Platform

Because I'm building project using Mecsimcalc, and I discovered several limitations of the platform, I implement solutions to these issues and anyone can use them on their code.

MecSimCalc currently supports only one file. Which is not really an option when you have more than 1k line of code soup and also some other formats like html files. So I write a bundler to bundle all the files into one and extract and run the code at runtime. This works great on all projects, not just this one.

I find that MecSimCalc allows running js in the output which is not really ideal since attackers can use it to carry out all sorts of attacks like XSS. So I write the code to address this issue by implementing a dynamical input table which sort of "bypass" the premium limit. This also works great for my program.

Challenges we ran into

The time is tight, and I had do write and learn different programming languages and math algorithms all by myself, so the mental pressure is definitely high on me. I first built the project locally and then port it onto the MecSimCalc platform, which I had to use various techniques to bypass certain limitations and ensures my code runs smoothly.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I was working on my own, and finished the project in 5 hours time
I implemented math algorithms entirely using my brain and wikipedia
Only numpy, matplotlib and standard python libs are used, no help from extra libraries
The code was written in OOP and structured nicely
Interface is nice.

What we learned

A quick start on Javascript and HTML
Write a self deflat wrapper of python scripts and binary files
Math lore
Matplotlib advanced use cases

What's next for Molfraw Beams

The beam currently solves for rigid beams. For rigid beams, more than two supports makes or more than one fixed support makes it indeterminate. I know there's a Euler–Bernoulli beam equation that solves for more than two supports by using deflection method. But it's outside my current knowledge.

I will learn from my professor and improve the code to support for arbitrarily number of supports, hopefully.