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

1. MATLAB (2016a or newer for Windows, 2017a or newer for macOS)
2. SPACAR (full) 2017
3. SPACAR Light, distributed via GitHub.

Both Windows and macOS are supported.

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.

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\

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\example.m

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

To test the installation, the example.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.

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.)