Samir's Notes on Jupyter

Jupyter is a cool notebook server that works in your browser and allows you to use python notebooks on your computer.

Install Jupyter

Follow this gist. Ignore irrelevant parts.

Using Markdown

The default text formatting in Jupyter is markdown. Basic markdown syntax

Samir's Notes on SCL

Using alternative dynamics engines

We shall consider replacing scl's default dynamics engine in this tutorial. An excellent alternative is to use Simbody.

The first step is to obtain and install the new dynamics engine. This involves loading the libraries to be linked into some standard directory, and saving the header files in a directly that all applications have access to.

One strategy has been to integrate dynamics engines in scl directly. While this is simpler for users it involves a few issues:

1. First and foremost, it is nice to acknowledge the contributions of people who built the new dynamics engine. So we ask you to download and install their library directly.
2. It will save the SCL maintainers the work of updating the 3rdparty library and its associated dependencies.
3. It will reduce the size of the scl library.

Steps to using Simbody. I shall assume you know how to use svn and can access simbody's public repository.

1. Get the code.
   $ svn checkout https://simtk.org/svn/simbody/trunk simbody.svn
2. Compile the code. Simbody has a nice cmake interface.
   $ cd simbody.svn $ mkdir build $ cmake .. $ make -j8
3. Optional: If you are like me, you don't like providing applications with admin access. There is a way to install without doing so. It involves taking control of a directory.
   $ sudo su $ mkdir /usr/local/SimTK $ chown -R <your_username>:<your_username> /usr/local/SimTK/ $ exit
4. Now install simbody
   $ make install
5. Now that we have the new dynamics engine ready to go, the next step is to integrate it with scl. The easiest way to do this is to subclass scl/dynamics/CDynamicsBase.hpp , which provides a set of necessary and sufficient template functions.