Mechanical Engineers vs. Programming
Last week, I met a friend from my engineering school days in a bar. We both work as mechanical engineers now, so the natural progression of our conversation lead to taking about what we do at work. I mentioned to him that I spend more than half of my time at work programming things. He seemed a little surprised.
In engineering school, at least in the Mechanical Engineering department, most people do not like programming. I never minded programming at school but I was never too interested to learn more than the basic introduction to C++. I realized how powerful programming was at my Internship when I wrote a macro in Excel to crunch data, and a macro in solidworks to automate CAD design.
After a couple months of learning and experimenting, the arduino program I struggled writing became easier, and I wasn’t scared of using beagle-bone for my next project.
The whole point of this rant is mechanical engineers should be educated more on the importance of programming in school. It makes a great addition to the toolkit that a recent graduate has. Here are a few scenarios that engineers may use programming in the job.
- Excel Macro
- SOlidworks Automation
- Any FEA/ dynamic body simulation software allows some programming interface
- Data analysis
- Understand Arduino and other microcontrollers better.
OK I AM SOLD… WHERE DO I START??
The first place I would recommend starting is with Excel Macro. I have no doubt that mechanical engineers will use lots of excel, so learning how to write simple macros in Excel has the potential to make you very efficient at your work. In addition, Excel uses the same programming language as Solidworks’s API, so the knowledge is transferable.
I recommend buying the book Excel VBA for dummies to get started. It goes into detail about some programming concepts and helps you get a jump start. In addition VBA is a very simple programming language to start programming.
That’s all for my first blog post.
Happy Learning!!