reactance.tar.gz- zip of main code and accessories
- (6.38 KiB) Downloaded 206 times
- What it looks like running
- reactance.png (17.38 KiB) Viewed 1976 times
There are a couple pieces here. getperlmods.sh - is how you gather up all the perl modules I use all the time. It pretty much hammers the collection. Unlike some modern languages that need lots of megs or come with it all in one enormous module, perl is, um, modular. Many of the modules have been made into .deb packages, and fwiw, that's a better way to get them and all their dependencies, especially the older ones, so that's what this shell script does where possible. I suggest it be run on any debian based system before trying any of my GUI or database code because, well, this is the dependencies for that sort of thing and they all go in clean and relatively effortlessly this way. Note the .deb packages have different names than the underlying perl modules - I've sorted all that out for us (helps me too - my old main squeeze computer kinda fried and this one's new...so since I had to work all that out anyway...here we are).
Both apt and cpanminus are good about handling things already present - they'll maybe upgrade to the latest, or just skip them. In other words, you can run this script over and over and no harm done.
I supply the .glade file separately, but that's only so you can open it and mess around in the glade GUI editor. The actual in-use glade-xml is already contained in the perl program after the __END__ tag - so if you change the .glade file and want the real thing to change, you have two options. Change the call in "initialize" to use the .glade file - or copy the modified glade xml into the perl file after the __END__ in place of the stuff that's there.
All you really need is reactance and those modules.
Oh, for those so inclined to use the main menu customizer (Mint has this anyway) to make a menu or panel entry, I found a little pic that makes a nice icon. I put them (I'm doing a lot of these little custom thingies) in /usr/share/icons/gnome - mainly because it was uncluttered and it's easy to navigate to from where the editor expects to find things for your current desktop theme.
You do have to be root to write to there. The location isn't really important, it's a matter of keeping the room organized, so to speak.
- Cute? icon for your menu
- LC.png (2.55 KiB) Viewed 1976 times
The title and tooltips mostly say all you need to know. But there are a couple special tricks that you'll either love or despise - let me know.
This computes all four of inductance, capacitance, frequency, and Z of an element, from any two of them being known and entered. 1 won't work, and 3 is over-specified and will get you a humorous error dialog and a start over (well, maybe I have a lousy sense of humor).
Special things include - typing enter while in any edit box also pushes the "Calculate" button. Typing escape in the same boxes will clear them all in case of oops - a shortcut so you don't need a mouse to work this (tabbing, mousing, and so on work as usual in GUIs).
Changing the units in the dropdown before all four are filled in simply changes how the thing interprets your inputs - handy as you can say, for example 1 tab dropdown microhenry and it'll work as you'd expect.
After all four are full, probably via doing the compute - hitting the dropdowns will change the numbers. As if you had 1 henry in the L boxes - and change the dropdown to millihenries - the number will change to 1000. Handy if your first guess as to what magnitudes are going to be is a bit off...
This is my replacement for the old Shure calculator given to government engineers in 1943 to aid in the war effort. The originals were riveted cardboard, and began to fall apart in the '70s or so (my family had a few) and while I worked at Bunker-Ramo for ARPA, we disassembled them and xeroxed them to make more, and an old scan of one of those is up here, complete with nicotine stains from the old days. This, unlike that, isn't quite as slick for showing you the perspective of scales at a glance - but instead does have accuracy and the ability to quickly fix any misconceptions in that regard. I'll call it a tie. It looks good here with my dark mint theme...
