PyPO User Manual
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Introduction

Welcome to the PyPO user manual. Here you can find several resources that will assist in using and/or developing PyPO. PyPO is optical simulation software, aimed at engineers/students in the field of (quasi)-optical design that have access to CUDA-capable GPUs. The software can be run multi-threaded, but the real power shines through when running PyPO on the GPU.

Originally, PyPO was developed for laboratory characterisation and optical alignment of wideband integrated superconducting spectrometers operating at sub-mm wavelengths. It is specifically designed to model forward and backward propagation of electromagnetic fields through systems containing (off-axis) quadric and planar reflector surfaces. In addition, it can calculate common metrics to assess performance of the optical system and can also visualise the systems and results.

This homepage contains general information regarding installation instructions, the content of the user manual, contributor guidelines and contact information. After installing, the best place to start for new users would be the PyPO fundamentals tutorials, after which the rest of the tutorials can be studied. PyPO also comes with a suite of demonstrations that show the application of the program in the context of validation tests. For contributor guidelines and general development instructions, please see the instructions for developers page.

Installation

The installation instructions can be found here - Installation.

User Manual

For a basic understanding of PyPO and its design, we refer to the explanations page. These explanations are less related to using PyPO, but more to how PyPO works under the hood.

Several tutorials have been developed in order to demonstrate the usage and functionality of PyPO:

  • the first set of tutorials showcase the functionalities of the package,
  • the second and final set show how to use the GUI.

Notebooks demonstrating usage in the context of validation tests are grouped together in the demonstrations page. These can serve as good starting points for experimenting with PyPO in actual physical simulations.

The software documentation for PyPO is split into two parts:

  • the first part forms a comprehensive API reference for all public methods of PyPO,
  • the second part forms a reference for all internal Python, C/C++ and CUDA code.

In addition, the documentations page contains a comprehensive overview of the common input/output types of PyPO.

Contributor Guidelines

The contributor and development guidelines can be found here. These guidelines contain information on how to raise issues concerning PyPO, how to contribute code but also how to run the unit tests and how to generate documentation.

License

This project is released under the MIT License.

Contact

For questions/support, please contact: PyPO..nosp@m.dev@.nosp@m.gmail.nosp@m..com