VIKTOR’s Post

Transcript

In this engineering skills Python project, we're going to write a 2D Truss analysis app using Victor, the Low code engineering app development platform. So sharing your your analysis in the form of a web app, an app that can be run in the browser essentially is a great way of sharing the details of your analysis with project stakeholders or colleagues, but without necessarily having to share the code that powers those analysis. So this is the app that we're going to build. As I said, it's a 2D Truss analysis app. Now it's quite a simple app, but don't let that fool you because in building. Place we're going to cover an awful lot of the basics that are going to allow you to go on and build your own apps by the time you finish this project. So this app is based on the Python scripts that we built in a previous tutorial for analyzing 2D trusses using open seas. And in fact, we can see that that script here on the right. So this was the guy we built previously and this is in a Jupiter notebook. I'm a huge fan of Jupiter notebooks. I think they're a fantastic resource. And this notebook will do all of the analysis that we wanted to do. And but it, it has a certain barrier to Aintree when it comes to sharing this, particularly if trying to share it with somebody who's not familiar with Python. There is, I suppose, a reasonable amount of code in here. And if, if, if the other user of this, of this notebook isn't familiar with Python, there's going to be a bit of a barrier to entry there because you know, that can look quite intimidating if you don't know what you're looking at. And that's where our web app comes in over on the left. Outside here so let's take a look through this guy here so again this this app is going to do all of the exact same analysis but it's going to allow the end user to interact with the with the tool essentially in a much easier way so the first thing we have here is a welcome screen we can customize that to to whatever we like naturally enough, I have engineering skills plastered all over it but you could have whatever you want on on a welcome screen obviously then we come into the data input section so this is where the. End user would would basically define the analysis that they're going to, they're going to perform. So we start off by providing some constants and so we've got Young's modulus here and we've got a cross-sectional area. And those are basically mirroring. If I look at our original source script here, that's mirroring the data input over here. So we then have a deflection scale factor which allows us to increase the scale of the deflected shape just so it makes it a little bit easier to see coming on down. From there, we have the structure definition. So define the geometry of the structure. Now, the way I've written this is that, uh, we want the end user to be able to upload a CSV file that defines the geometry of the structure. And of course we can, we can explain what the format of that CSV file should be, but we've also made it possible for the user to download a sample geometry file. And so they can download a sample geometry file, they can see how it's put together and modified if they like, and then they can. Upload a geometry file. So either the sample file directly, upload that again so they have something to work with straight away, or they can upload their own geometry file obviously. So if we go ahead and upload the sample geometry file that I downloaded previously, we can see our upload window opens up, we can select a file, let's get that guy there and open it up. Save selection and then straight away our structure appears on the right hand side are very familiar sample structure that we would sort of roll out for all of these project bills and tutorials. Once we've defined our structure, we can see it over on the right hand side. Next we can come on down and define some restraints. And again, defining restraint is is much more user friendly in this setting than it is over in the Jupiter notebook. So we can define a node number, let's say node #1 we'd like to be a pin and. No number, let's say five, we would like to be a roller in the X direction. Now we can come down to defining our applied loads. Let's just keep it simple. We'll alley onto node 4A load of, let's say -10,000 the Y direction. And once that's done, we can go ahead and view our graphical results. And we can see our axial force diagram on top here and our deflected shape on the bottom. And we can go back up to our slider, our scale slider, and change the scale of that deflected. Hope to make it a little bit more obvious. And so you can see if I compare the output on the left with the output of our Jupiter notebook on the right, of course, it's the exact same thing because we're using this Jupiter notebook as the basis for the app that we're building over here on the left. All right then, so let's focus in on our app again. We can review our results in table format so we can see all of our nodal displacements, all of our member forces, and all of our reactions. Well, our two reactions in our structure. So there you have it. It's it's a much more easily shareable and easy to interact with version of our analysis that doesn't come with the same baggage or the same barrier to entry that a duper notebook would come with. And the final thing we can do is we could export our results in a CSV file if our end user wanted to do any further reporting with them. So I hope you'll agree there's a lot of benefits to being able to convert at least some of your scripts from Pure. Jupiter notebooks or Python files over to more user-friendly shareable web applications. So on this project, we're going to walk through the complete build process for this app, right from setting up our development environment through to deploying our finished app online. So I'll see you inside the project.