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SPACAR Light

Installation

To run simulations with SPACAR Light, the following components all need to be installed:

  1. MATLAB (2016a or newer for Windows, 2019b or newer for macOS)
  2. SPACAR Light, distributed via GitHub
  3. For Windows 10: Microsoft Visual C++ 2010 Redistributable package (choose the x64 version).

Both Windows and macOS (Intel processors) are supported. There's no support for Macs with Apple Silicon (M1 and M2) processors yet.

1. Get MATLAB

Note that version older than indicated might work, but they are not supported. After installation, a default user work folder is created automatically. Typically it is

on Windows:  C:\Users/[user]\Documents\MATLAB
on macOS:  /Users/[user]/Documents/MATLAB

You can find the path by running userpath in the command window.

2. Get SPACAR (full) 2017

Download the zip-file containing SPACAR (full) 2017 (see link at the top of this page). It is recommended that you extract this into a new folder spacar, located in the default user work folder of MATLAB. The spacar folder will contain some files and a private folder. The folder structure would then look like:

[userpath]\spacar\spacar.mexw64
[userpath]\spacar\spacar.mexmaci64
[userpath]\spacar\spavisual.m
[userpath]\spacar\stressbeam.m
... etc ...
[userpath]\spacar\private\

3. Get SPACAR Light

Development is active and happening on GitHub. The latest version can be found there. In case of bug fixes and new features, that page will reflect the changes. Download the 'Source code (zip)'-file of the most recent version. Extract this in the same spacar folder as in the previous step. The following files should now also be present:

[userpath]\spacar\spacarlight.m
[userpath]\spacar\spacarexample.m

(The README.md file and .gitignore file can be ignored.)

4. Test the installation

To test the installation, the spacarexample.m file is provided (and located in the [userpath]\spacar folder, as per step 3). Open this file in MATLAB and hit Run. If this produces a new Spavisual window, without errors in the MATLAB command window, it is likely that SPACAR Light is installed correctly.

Mac users

Running SPACAR on macOS for the first time may trigger Gatekeeper, displaying a message that spacar.mexmaci64 cannot be opened because the developer cannot be verified. This is to be expected and can be dealt with by clicking Cancel (not Move to Trash). Then, go to System Preferences, Security & Privacy, tab General, and click Open Anyway. Now, again run spacarexample.m in MATLAB. The same message may appear once more for getfrsbf.mexmaci64; follow the same steps. After that, SPACAR should run.

5. Configure The MATLAB Search Path

To keep all files of the SPACAR software bundle together, the spacar folder was created within the userpath in a previous step. It is recommended to keep user scripts for a particular model out of this folder, and store those at [userpath]\myscript.m (or within a separate folder [userpath]\mymodel\myscript.m).

When doing so and running myscript.m, MATLAB is likely unable to find SPACAR Light without configuring the search path appropriately. This can be accomplished by simply adding the line

addpath('spacar')

to the top of myscript.m (when it is indeed located at [userpath]\myscript.m; otherwise see doc addpath in the MATLAB command window.)

installation.txt · Last modified: 2022/10/13 18:39 by marijn.nijenhuis