README

Tracer - a Pythonic ray-tracing package with solar energy focus.

About
-----
Tracer is a ray-tracing engine and suite of tools focused on solar energy 
applications.

The motivation for writing tracer:
* Current solutions lack programmability and extensibility
* Even if you pay megabucks
* De-facto standard tools of the trade are non-free, so bugfixing
  etc. depends on someone else,
* Usability in the solution closest to our budget is poor, and no Linux
  port is available.

Tracer is written in Python, using NumPy and SciPy for the math side of things.

Status
------
The code is advanced enough to produce research. It is currently a programming
library. NO GUI yet.

Current capablilities:
- Flat, parabolic, spherical and conical surfaces
- Specular and diffuse reflections with surface slope error
- A bunch of results analysis tools
- Pillbox and Buie sunshape implementations
- Radiosity sytem solver for thermal emissions
- Basic parallel processing

There are no provisions for spectral response or polarization yet, but the 
package is designed to make it easy to add them, and also to remove unnecessary
features and plug in speed-improving optical and geometrical models that
utilize problem-specific features.

Open-source python magic happens: if you want to do something, you can do it.

Installation
------------
LINUX:
To install Tracer on your system, run the following from the command line from your downloaded Tracer directory:

  python setup.py install

Before installing, make sure that the following dependencies are installed:
- Numpy/Scipy (http://www.scipy.org/scipylib/download.html)
  command: sudo apt-get install python-numpy

- Matplotlib (http://matplotlib.org/downloads.html)
  command: sudo apt-get install python-matplotlib

- Coin 3D (https://bitbucket.org/Coin3D/coin/downloads)
  command: sudo apt-get install python-pivy

- Pathos (https://github.com/uqfoundation)
  This one requires you to download the packages from the github repository and run the installs individually using "python setup.py install" in your downloaded directories. All the dependencies (dill, pox, multiprocess and ppft) are on the same github repository and should be installed individually.

WINDOWS:
To run on MS Windows:
- Follow steps on this link to run a Linux distribution on windows: https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/wsl/install-win10
- Download Tracer packages from here
- Download an X Server for windows in order to render the images: https://sourceforge.net/projects/xming/
- Run the X Server Client
- Run Tracer

Getting Help, Getting Involved
------------------------------
Slightly outdated documentation and reference matereial can be found on 
http://yosefm.github.com/tracer/