PyVMEC2

This will be the next version of PyVMEC, rebuilt from the ground up, with much more functionality in mind.

Environment

This is built with PsychoPy 2021.2.3 which does not run on newer version of Python (3.10 / 3.11) without issues. So here are instructions to set up an environment with Python 3.8.10:

First you need to install pyenv. Instructions for Mac and Windows are on their GitHub page: https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv

For Linux, I got them from this page: https://www.dwarmstrong.org/pyenv/

First download:

$ git clone https://github.com/pyenv/pyenv.git ~/.pyenv

Then add this to the end of your profile (~/.profile or ~/.bash_profile):

if [ -d "$HOME/.pyenv" ] ; then
    export PYENV_ROOT="$HOME/.pyenv"
    command -v pyenv >/dev/null || export PATH="$PYENV_ROOT/bin:$PATH"
    eval "$(pyenv init -)"
fi

You also want to set the LD_LIBRARY_PATH in one way or another. This could be done at the start of any experiment / code, this would give some more flexibility, but it's easier to forget. Or it could also be added to the profile file:

# link personal library:
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:~/.pyenv/versions/3.8.10/lib/python3.8/site-packages/wx

Now reload your profile (e.g. $ . ~/.profile) so that these paths are added to the shell environment. You now have pyenv installed, so there should be two new folders at the start of your $PATH:

$ echo $PATH

One for shims and one bin folder.

Since pyenv compiles Python, you need tools to do that. On Debian-based systems:

$ sudo apt install make build-essential libssl-dev zlib1g-dev libbz2-dev libreadline-dev libsqlite3-dev wget curl llvm libncursesw5-dev xz-utils tk-dev libxml2-dev libxmlsec1-dev libffi-dev liblzma-dev

On Fedora-based systems:

$ sudo dnf install make gcc zlib-devel bzip2 bzip2-devel readline-devel sqlite sqlite-devel openssl-devel tk-devel libffi-devel xz-devel

Now you can install (many!) older versions of Python. For PyVMEC you want Python 3.8.10:

$ pyenv install -v 3.8.10

And then you can set your environment (current bash shell) to use that with:

$ pyenv local 3.8.10

Or even:

$ pyenv global 3.8.10

PsychoPy

PsychoPy relies on wxWidgets which uses the GTK+ libraries, so these should also be installed on the system. Depending on your version of linux, this could look like:

$ sudo apt-get install build-essential libgtk-3-dev

You can then install everything necessary to run PyVMEC2, still from commandline:

$ pip3 install psychopy==2021.2.3 wxwidgets==1.0.5 ipython==8.9.0 numpy==1.22

Or, more recently:

$ pip3 install psychopy==2021.2.3 wxwidgets==1.0.5 ipython==8.9.0 numpy==1.22 cython==0.29.36 sip==6.7.9 wxPython==4.1.1 SpeechRecognition==3.10.0

Screeninfo, Scipy

For reading out information about monitors, we use the screeninfo module (version 0.8.1 currently):

$ pip3 install screeninfo==0.8.1 scipy==1.3.3

For some advanced options, we use scipy.optimize.

Installing PyVMEC2

Once the required environment and dependencies are set up, you should create a folder for everything to live in, for example: VisuomotorAdaptation. Then within this folder, you should clone this repository:

$ cd VisuomotorAdaptation
$ git clone https://github.com/thartbm/PyVMEC2.git

That's it for the installing part... unless you want it available system-wide, then you should put it somewhere on the system path. But as long as you're in the parent folder, you can now import PyVMEC2 as a module:

$ ipython3
Python 3.8.10 ...
In [1]: from PyVMEC2 import *
pygame 2.1.2  ...


In [2]: runExperiment(experiment='diagnostic_triplets', participant='marius')