Installation

This section goes through the required steps to get pySIMTRA running on your system.

Acquire the SIMTRA application

Since this package is based on SIMTRA, the application needs to be acquired first from here. Since SIMTRA only runs on Windows operating systems, the part of the package running the actual simulation can only be used on Windows. However, defining, loading and exporting components and sputter systems also works on the other operating systems.

Installation

Install via pip:

The most convenient way of installing the package is via PyPI by simply running:

pip install pysimtra

Install via GitHub:

Alternatively, you can install the package from the GitHub directly. If you want to test the package in a separated environment and you are using Anaconda, we recommend to create a new conda environment first via the following command. The package works with python 3.9 or later and was developed with 3.11.

conda create -n pysimtra_env python=3.11

Then clone the repository:

git clone https://github.com/felixthln/pysimtra.git
cd pysimtra

…and install automatically via the local pip install command:

pip install .

Import the SIMTRA application into the package

Lastly, the acquired SIMTRA application needs to be imported into pySIMTRA so it can be automatically accessed when executing simulations. For this, first import the installed package into your code, then define the path of the directory containing the SIMTRA application (the “.exe” files and other downloaded folders). Finally, run the method ps.import_exe in order to import the application. The import is permanent, therefor this only needs to be done once or after updating the package.

import pysimtra as ps

# Specify the path to the directory with the SIMTRA executables
simtra_path = 'add-your-path-here'
# Import the executables into the package
ps.import_exe(simtra_path)

Afterward, all functionalities of the package can be used to full extend. Visit the User Guide to learn the basic functionalities based on examples. The full API is specified in the API Reference section.