Flashcards for engineering students

Nobody passes an engineering degree by memorising. You pass it by solving problems — which you cannot do fluently while you are still reconstructing the standard form of a second-order response, or checking which way the sign convention runs, or looking up a constant for the fourth time this week.

That recall layer is worth automating. Everything below is about getting it out of the way.

Equations are cards, and they render as equations

LaTeX renders during review exactly as it does in your notes, so a card can be the mathematics rather than a description of it.

---
tags: [decks/control]
---

## What is the standard form of a second-order system?

$$H(s) = \frac{\omega_n^2}{s^2 + 2\zeta\omega_n s + \omega_n^2}$$

Which reviews as:

More usefully, cloze deletions work inside $…$ maths. That matters because you rarely forget an entire formula — you forget one term, one exponent, one factor of two:

The damped natural frequency is $\omega_d = \omega_n\sqrt{1 - ==\zeta^2==}$.

One blank, in context, testing the bit that actually goes missing. Blanking the whole expression would test something you never get wrong.

Derivations, one step per card

A derivation is a sequence, and sequences make poor single cards — a card whose back is nine lines of algebra is a card you will fail for the wrong reasons.

Write it as you would anyway, with each step under its own heading. Headings above your configured level become breadcrumb context rather than cards, so every step carries Laplace transforms > Solving an RLC circuit with it and you always know which derivation a step belongs to. See Header + paragraph.

Constants, units and conversions

The dullest recall in engineering is also the easiest to automate. A two-column table turns each row into a card, and adding one later is a one-line edit:

## Material properties

| Quantity                   | Value                    |
| -------------------------- | ------------------------ |
| Young's modulus, mild steel | 200 GPa                 |
| Density of aluminium        | 2700 kg/m³              |
| Permittivity of free space  | $8.854 \times 10^{-12}$ F/m |

For anything with more fields — quantity, symbol, SI unit, typical range — bind a wider table to a template so it renders consistently instead of running together.

Diagrams: image occlusion

Circuit diagrams, free-body diagrams, phase diagrams, control block diagrams, Mohr’s circle — all of it is learned by position, and none of it survives being described in words.

Image occlusion lets you draw boxes over a figure and turn each into a card. Two things that matter here: masks are stored as percentage coordinates, so a diagram occluded on a laptop is still correctly masked on a phone; and each mask can carry its own Markdown or LaTeX answer, so a box over a component can reveal its governing equation rather than just its name.

Canvas decks for how a system fits together

This is the format engineering gets the most out of, and it is easy to miss.

A canvas deck turns an Obsidian Canvas into a deck. Text nodes parse with the usual four formats — but connect two nodes with an edge and the edge itself becomes a card: the from-node is the question, the to-node is the answer, and the edge label is an optional hint.

That maps directly onto the things engineering asks you to hold in your head as relationships rather than facts:

• A signal chain, drawn as a chain — input → plant → sensor → controller — where each link is a card.
• A transform table as one-to-many: one node for a function, edges out to its Laplace, Fourier and Z transforms.
• Failure modes as many-to-one: several causes, all edging into one observed symptom.

You draw the system once, the way you would on paper, and get the recall for free. Chains, one-to-many and many-to-one all work, and unconnected nodes still parse normally.

Problem sheets and lecture slides

Course material arrives as PDFs, and often as scans. PDF ingestion reads a document’s outline so you tick the two chapters you were set rather than feeding it the whole textbook. Photographed notes and scanned handouts go through OCR first, including maths transcribed as LaTeX — which is the part that usually makes scanned engineering material useless to a text tool.

Extraction from text-based PDFs works with your own API key; OCR for scanned pages is the one part that needs DecksMD Pro.

Before the exam

Exam decks run a graded, one-sitting session with an optional time limit, and — importantly — do not touch your FSRS scheduling. Sitting a mock paper the week before costs you nothing in spacing. Multiple choice comes from ordinary markdown task lists; formula cards are asked as type-in.

For the derivation-heavy subjects, set grading to self-graded: an exact-match grader marking your working is worse than no grader at all.

More guides

• Flashcards for medical school
• Flashcards for law students
• Flashcards for language learning
• Flashcards for exam preparation

Or start with what FSRS actually is, or how DecksMD compares with Anki and the Spaced Repetition plugin.