Exercise - Use advanced commands

  • 5 minutes

You have created a basic notebook with some Markdown and a widget to start your ship. There is a lot more you can do with notebooks, however!

In your ship's manual, you'd like to create a chart of your ship's daily statistics. You can create all kinds of interesting charts in a notebook, which is also useful for data scientists and machine learning engineers (not just astronauts). Build a chart to show your ship's oxygen levels by using Matplotlib, a popular library for creating charts and graphs in Python.

Create a visualization

Build a bar chart with some mock data to show how you could plot oxygen levels in your ship. To do this, you'll need some more libraries.

  1. Install numpy:

    pip install numpy

  2. Install matplotlib:

    pip install matplotlib

  3. Create a Markdown block to notate what you will display:

    ## Oxygen levels

Display ten minutes of oxygen levels in your ship.

  4. Create a new code block and import two libraries, numpy and matplotlib. Use them to build a bar chart:

    import numpy as np
import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
data = np.random.default_rng(12345)
oxy_nums = data.integers(low=0, high=10, size=10)

plt.bar(range(len(oxy_nums)), oxy_nums)
plt.show()

    Of course, this data is a mockup of real data, using numpy to create an array of 10 integers between 1 and 10.

  5. Run the code.

    Tip

    You might need to change presentation to image/png to render the image in the notebook.

    Screenshot that shows the Change Presentation option in the notebook.

    Your bar chart looks like this:

    Screenshot that shows an example of a bar chart.

    Tip

    If you hover your mouse over the chart image in the notebook, you can save the chart as a .png file image to your local computer for future reference.

Perform ship calculations

Next, you want to show the time that your ship needs to take to get up to a good speed. Annotate and create an equation that will allow you to input your ship's start velocity, desired end velocity, and acceleration in meters per second.

  1. Create a Markdown block to explain the equation:

    ## Ship's velocity

Show the seconds needed to get from 0 to 60 meters per second, given the ship's acceleration in meters per second.

  2. Add a code block for the equation:

    endVelocity = 60
startVelocity = 0
acceleration = 9.8

time = (endVelocity - startVelocity) / acceleration
print("Time to reach desired velocity = ", time)

  3. Run the code block to determine how long it will take to reach your desired velocity.

    Screenshot that shows the output of the code in the notebook.

  4. Tweak the start and end velocity values, or the acceleration, to determine how your spaceship will perform.

    Tip

    Try adding some different values for your variables to see how they affect the outcome of the equation.

Congratulations! You have successfully created a ship's manual that shows some useful information about your spaceship. Because everything is contained in a Jupyter notebook, you won't have any difficulty keeping track of it, as it's all well-annotated and nicely displayed. It even includes an ignition switch! Jupyter notebooks are a useful way to display all kinds of data and even small user interfaces.