Mathcad Tips

Mathcad Prime 11 world premiere sneak peek + roadmap REPLAY ON-DEMAND!

Worksheet corresponding to this week's PTC Mathcad blog post: "Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells, Jingle All the WAV Files"This worksheet will generate a WAV file of a simple rendition of "Jingle Bells", as performed by PTC Mathcad.

This is the worksheet used in the blog, Audible Illusions with PTC Mathcad Programming.

It's a new, 2024 version of our "Happy Easter!" Easter Egg! What's different from the previous years' eggs is that this one is in Mathcad Prime 9, which allows us to use the "More Colors..." custom colour picker, for a far wider range of designs than before. The attached worksheet predominantly uses PTC's colour palette, which requires use of the custom colour picker... but there are some extra fun (non-PTC), previously unusable colours too, like pure green (0,255,0) and pink.   Happy Easter 2024!

Create 2 polar plot for the functions cos(x), cos(x)^(-1) and cos(x)^(-2). Set the line trace style to full line, the result plot for the cos(x)^(-2) is invalid, other line trace valid.

Join us on January 22 nd , at 1:00 pm ET for PTC’s Virtual Event – Leverage Engineering Calculations in Your Design Process. This webcast will demonstrate how the correct handling and reliable documentation of engineering calculations can greatly impact the success of your project, as well as:   Discuss the challenges in leveraging engineering knowledge in your product design process. Take a deeper look at Mathcad’s capabilities and how it can help solve your engineering problems. Explore how the Engineering Notebook records critical product information in the model itself. Reserve your seat today!

There's more to this Easter egg than meets the eye.  This Easter Egg was created with a Mathcad Prime 6.0 Surface Plot, all within PTC Mathcad.   Download the attached Mathcad Prime file (EE.mcdx), manipulate the surface plot display, and see if you can find the hidden message.    h/t Anji Seberino!

This month’s challenge is related to electrical engineering. We have a simple circuit with an electrical potential of 220 Volts. Initially we have a single 10 Ohm resistor. Then we add a second resistor in parallel, with 10% higher resistance. Then we add a third resistor in parallel, with 10% higher resistance than the previous resistor. And so on. Calculate the current in the circuit for the single resistor case. Calculate the resistance of each additional resistor and current through each resistor for 2, 3, 4, 5, and 10 resistors in parallel. Can you write a function or program that calculates the resistance of each resistor and current through each resistor for n resistors in parallel? These calculations are fairly straightforward, so it will be interesting to see what tools – vectors, matrices, loops, plots, charts, etc. – that you use to solve the problem. As always, how you document your calculations is important as your worksheet will be visible to the community. Here is an example of three resistors in parallel, as drawn in Creo Schematics:   Find the Mathcad Community Challenge Guidelines here!

Professor Tetsuro Tokoro (ttokoro on the PTC Community) is a member of the Institute of Electrical Engineers of Japan (IEEJ), and he has dedicated much of his time to teaching and studying electric circuit design for his college students at Japan’s National Institute of Technology (KOSEN), Gifu College.   A true man of math, ttokoro finds helping community members solve their problems to be very fun. He seeks out math-based brain teasers and shares them with the Mathcad community to gain the insights of his kind and very intelligent fellow Mathcad users. These include resistor meshes (including in 3D), perfect squared squares, and a puzzle where you must identify the minimum radius on a circle with n number of points where all distances between points must be an integer. Sometimes, he looks for problems on rosettacode.org to solve.   According to ttokoro, many of these problems are unique and won’t be found in a textbook (and many math textbooks in use were written before math software came to the scene) but demonstrate the value of math software. Ttokoro ventures to say that a lot of these problems cannot be solved by hand, or at least it would be unviable to do so, especially for students. Instead, Mathcad and its programming operators must be used to solve these problems.   Montage of resistor meshes and other fun problems ttokoro has introduced   Beginning in 2021, ttokoro has also become a prolific uploader of Japanese PTC Mathcad content on YouTube. Many of these videos share tips or are tie-ins to the puzzles he or others post on the PTC Community, including the Mathcad Community Challenges.   Ttokoro’s best resistor 3D mesh electric circuit. (Each edge is made by one ohm. Find the resistance between Node [0,0,0] and [1,1,2].)   Ttokoro first started using Mathcad with Mathcad 12, and his biggest requests for Mathcad Prime features are transparent colour availability and for the Animation tool to return. You’ll notice that in his brain teasers, as well as in his submissions to the Mathcad Community Challenges, ttokoro likes to show results with plots because it helps convey the meaning better than with math results alone and having more tools to show the results via images helps with that. This sort of thinking carries over to his academic work as well.   Ttokoro wearing his PTC Champion Jacket and PTC Mathcad T- shirt!   Thank you for your enthusiasm for math and contributions to the PTC Community, ttokoro!

PTC Mathcad Prime 8 has now released!   @CatMcchad a quick interview with PTC Mathcad's product manager, @amcgough, for this blog article about what's new and exciting in Mathcad Prime 8, what new functionality users and veterans will look forward to using, and how the Mathcad team decides what new functionality to put into each release. Much of that is customer-driven, and Andy cited several delivered requests from the Mathcad Ideas board on this very community. Read the interview here: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/why-prime8-andy-mcgough     Andy will also be available next week (March 22 at 10:00 Eastern) for a webinar about what's new in Mathcad Prime 8, featuring demos of the new functionality, plus a live Q&A portion with Andy that yours truly will be moderating. Register for that here (or catch the replay-on-demand after the fact): https://www.mathcad.com/en/resources/webcast/whats-new-mathcad-8   Happy calculating~

Registration has opened for the Mathcad Virtual Conference 2022! Happening September 13, 2022, 10:00 Eastern time.   This will be our third annual Mathcad conference, and this year we're promising to talk only about information with demos that you will find valuable and interesting. You'll hear from... Brian Thompson, Mathcad general manager, introducing the show and discussing the current state of Mathcad Andrew McGough, Mathcad product manager, presenting an updated Mathcad Prime roadmap, along with world-premiere demos of some of the new functionality coming to next year's Mathcad Prime 9 Anji Seberino, Mathcad application engineer, showcasing Mathcad Prime's powerful design of experiments functionality Anna Novikova, Mathcad software engineer, deeply detailing the improvements made to Mathcad Prime 8's numeric and symbolic engines (including some enhancements that were not documented in Mathcad Help) A Mathcad customer and how Mathcad Prime powers his innovative structural engineering start-up Throughout the conference, you'll get to share your feedback to PTC about the sessions. We'll also be manning a text-based Q&A box. And if you are within the first 500 registrants, you will be able to have your chance to win a raffle to win one of 25 brand-new 100% cotton Mathcad T-shirts. PTC hasn't had new Mathcad merchandise in about a decade, but now we do, and these shirts are quite wonderful. The raffle numbers will be drawn using a Mathcad Prime program during the conference.   We hope to see you there! And if you aren't able to make it on the day of, we are recording the sessions and will send you the recordings afterward. We really hope that you'll find this to be the best Mathcad conference that we've ever hosted.       (view in My Videos)  

  (Made in PTC Mathcad Prime 7)

Hi all! I'm pleased to announce that while Mathcad Prime 8 is releasing March 2022, we at PTC have just published a blog article letting you all know in advance what is being included! And PTC Community are the first ones to know. Check it out: https://www.mathcad.com/en/blogs/whats-mathcad-prime8   We'll post another announcement when Mathcad Prime 8 is actually released.   In the meantime, we've opened up registration for our accompanying What's New in Mathcad Prime 8 webinar coming March 22, 2022. I plan to moderate it, with Mathcad product manager Andrew McGough demoing the functionality in much more detail. The webinar will end with a live question and answer session.   Mathcad Prime 8 Webinar March 22   (Note that I'm not able to answer your Mathcad Prime 8 questions on this post, but Andy will certainly be able to in that webinar.)   Thanks!

Are you making the most of your engineering calculation software? Join a free webcast that explores using Mathcad and Excel Together. Presented by Anji Seberino, PTC’s leading Mathcad expert, the online event takes place Thursday, June 11 at 10 am PDT and 1 pm EDT.   Anji will focus the session on different methods for importing and interacting with Excel data in Mathcad. Plus, you’ll learn best practices for using Excel data in the following:   Calculations Plots Mathcad programs This webcast is part of the weekly education series for engineers who want to learn more about PTC Mathcad as a powerful alternative for engineering calculations. Visit the registration page to view weekly topics and sign up today to join in.  

Are you making the most of your engineering calculation software? REGISTER NOW for a free webcast that explores solving and optimization. Presented by Anji Seberino, PTC’s leading Mathcad expert, the online event takes place Thursday, June 18 at 10 am PDT and 1 pm EDT.   Anji will focus the session on solving linear and nonlinear systems. Plus, you’ll learn how to set up and solve optimization problems.   This webcast is part of the weekly education series for engineers who want to learn more about PTC Mathcad as a powerful alternative for engineering calculations. Visit the registration page to view weekly topics and sign up today to join in.   REGISTER NOW!  

Are you making the most of your engineering calculation software? Join us in a free webcast exploring symbolic calculations in PTC Mathcad. Presented by Anji Seberino, PTC’s leading Mathcad expert, the online event takes place Thursday, June 4 at 10 am PDT and 1 pm EDT. Seberino will focus the session on operations available through Mathcad’s symbolic calculation engine. Join in for an introduction to common and useful symbolic operations such as Symbolic solving Laplace transforms Variable substitution This webcast is part of the weekly education series for engineers who want to learn more about PTC Mathcad as a powerful alternative for engineering calculations. Visit the registration page to view weekly topics and sign up today to join in. Register Now!

https://www.engineering.com/story/my-top-3-engineering-nightmares-expert-shares-the-truth-on-software-selection   Anji Seberino, the head of our PTC Mathcad Application Engineer team, recently took some time to interview with engineering.com about her top 3 engineering nightmares accumulated from her own experience as an engineer. From missing units to debugging custom code to trying to reverse engineer IP stored in crazy, inherited spreadsheets, you too have probably faced these issues in your time in the industry when not everyone is using the right software and processes.   Let us know what you think of the interview!

A Mathcad user for 25 years, Professor Valery (‘Val’) Ochkov takes to the mountains when not involved in developing training and educational software for fossil and nuclear power plants.  He’s shown below in the Chimbulak region of Kazakstahn.   Val has long been involved in the Mathcad community! See the photo of the “Mathcad Clock.”       This is from a post back in 2010!  Beyond answering questions, Valery is also known for using math equations to create designs and authoring Mathcad trivia challenges for other community members to participate in. Some of the more entertaining challenges might be the Hare and Snell’s law and the Problem of Cockroach Races.  The Bicycle Post where Valery quizzes the community on how to solve “How many strokes with a bicycle pump need to be done to inflate the tire to 5atm” also inspired engagement. When asked for hobbies that don’t involve hiking boots, Val assured us his hobbies really are writing books and articles about Mathcad.   He’s now deeply interested in using Mathcad for STEM education, the subject of his latest book, 2⁵ Problems for STEM Education 2 (2020). He says collaborations with community members were critical to developing the material.  Way to go Mathcad Community!  Keep Collaborating! Keep engaging and great things like a book is born!            

I'm sharing a recent long-form interview that PTC's CAD/engineering calculations general manager, Brian Thompson, had with engineering.com: https://www.engineering.com/story/video/for-power-mathematics-retire-the-spreadsheet Alongside with the video interview, there is also a written transcript. You don't have to share any of your own information to access it.   For Power Mathematics, Retire the Spreadsheet   Brian talked through a wide variety of topics, including why engineers and research scientists across many various industries choose PTC Mathcad and how those customers use it, the old and painful days of trying to perform complex calculations in spreadsheets, and some glimpses into the future of Mathcad.

PTC has a Mathcad Scripted Control design Working Group for implementing scripted controls in Mathcad Prime 10.