CPSME Chair

This Python library was developed by the Chair of Cyber-Physical Systems in Mechanical Engineering at the TU Berlin. The Chair is led by Prof. Merten Stender and was founded January 2023. The Chair's research focuses on Digital Twins, Dynamics and Artificial Intelligence, and Hybrid Simulation.

This library provides tools to create standardized visual representations and plots according to the Chair's design guidelines. The two key functions for this are the following:

• Export Figure Function for consistent figure export
• Get Colors Function for unified color schemes

Export Figure Function

The CPSME has developed a function enabling users to effortlessly export Python matplotlib figures to .png, .svg, .pdf, and .tikz files. This function is called export_figure().

def export_figure(fig, 
                  name: str, 
                  savedir: str = None, 
                  style: str = None, 
                  width: float = None, 
                  height: float = None, 
                  resolution: int = 300)

Users can customize several parameters according to their preferences, which then will be reflected in the exported file. A quick explanation of the parameters, peculiarities, as well as a minimal working example of how to use the function can be found below.

Parameters

Peculiarities

• for plots with equal axes the input for the width is favored
• small offsets can happen randomly
• when exporting .tikz files the compatibility of Matplotlib and the library used for exporting the .tikz file needs to be accounted for; more detailed information can be found in the Exporting .tikz files from Python Matplotlib entry

Minimal Working Example

import numpy as np
from matplotlib import pyplot as plt

# import export_figure function from cpsmehelper library
from cpsmehelper import export_figure

# create plot 
data = np.random.randn(10)
fig, ax = plt.subplots()
ax.plot(data, data)
ax.plot(data, -data)
plt.xlabel('xlabel')
plt.ylabel('ylabel')
plt.legend(['some data', 'different data'])

# export figure to a .svg file with a set presentation style of one full PP textbox
export_figure(fig, name='test_presentation_1x1.svg', style='presentation_1x1')

Get Colors Function

The CPSME has a set of 'official' colors used for visualizations. The get_colors() function can be used to load a dict of the color set.

def get_colors(format: str = 'hash')

Users can set the format of the values returned in the dict or load specific colors. The function's format parameter, available colors, as well as a minimal working example can be found below.

Parameters

The following table shows the official' CPSME colors. The gradation of colors from 1 to 4 indicates a gradient from light to dark. The colors of the dict are called according to the 'variable' parameter in the table. How to call and use a specific color is shown in the minimal working example.

Minimal Working example

import matplotlib.pyplot as plt
import numpy as np

# import cpsme color dict 
from cpsmehelper import get_colors

# get entire color dict in hash values
cpsme_colors = get_colors()

# get one specific color in hash value
cpsme_red = get_colors()['red']

# generate data
x = np.linspace(0, 10, 100)  # 100 points from 0 to 10
y_1 = np.sin(x)                # sine function
y_2 = y_1 * 2

# create the plot
plt.figure(figsize=(8, 5))
plt.plot(x, y_1, label='Sine Wave ', color=cpsme_colors['blue_4'], linestyle='-', marker='o')  # use cpsme blue 4 for plot
plt.plot(x, y_2, label='Sine Wave * 2', color=cpsme_red, linestyle='-', marker='o')  # use cpsme red for plot

# add labels and title
plt.xlabel('X-axis')
plt.ylabel('Y-axis')
plt.title('Simple Sine Wave Plot')
plt.grid(True)
plt.legend()

# show the plot
plt.show()