Lab 2 -- Build a digital twin of a water tank

What you will build

brief: Show the destination first, as the literal terminal output the learner will see at the end -- three lines of it, verbatim. Seeing the end result is what makes someone willing to start.

What you will learn

brief: Phrased as capability, not curriculum. "You will be able to..." Three items, no more.

What you need

brief: Exact versions, never "a recent Python". Python 3.11+, the tanksim package from the course repository, a terminal. Say the lesson takes 45 minutes and mean it.

Step 1 -- Get the simulator running

brief: One action, and it ends with the command that proves it worked plus the output that command prints. Every step in this lesson ends that way; a step whose success the learner cannot see is where a lab goes quiet.

Step 2 -- Read one measurement

brief: Deliberately trivial. Its job is to establish the loop and the print, so step 3 can be about the estimator and nothing else.

Step 3 -- Add the estimate

brief: The two lines of arithmetic from chapter 3, with the gain given as a constant. Do not derive it here -- the derivation is the chapter, and repeating it stops the lesson dead.

Step 4 -- Watch it correct itself

brief: The payoff step. The learner changes the inflow by hand and watches the estimate track it. If a learner cannot see this happen, the lesson has failed, so the step ends with what the numbers should look like before and after.

What you built

brief: Restate what now works, in the learner's terms. Two sentences.

Where to go next

brief: The only section that may cite. Point at the two corpus papers that frame what was just done by hand, plus chapter 4 for the matrix form and the tuning question deferred from step 3.

queries:

• state estimation introduction survey
• digital twin synchronisation