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, with a very rudimentary GUI library under construction.

It is possible to build nested models using flat, paraboloid and spherical
surfaces, using various optical properties, or to derive new ones. A pillbox
sunshape model is provided, and any ray bundle can be programmatically created.

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.

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

  python setup.py install

Before installing, make sure that the following dependencies are installed:
* NumPy
* SciPy
Both available from http://www.scipy.org/

Optional dependencies:
* Matplotlib - http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/
* MayaVi - http://code.enthought.com/projects/mayavi/

To test that things are working, run the test-suite in the tests/
subdirectory, using nosetests or some similar tool.

Also check out examples/test_case.py as a starting-point to the code. Running it
requires Matplotlib to be installed. The other examples in that directory
require MayaVi to run.

Getting Help, Getting Involved
------------------------------
Slightly outdated documentation and reference matereial can be found on 
http://yosefm.github.com/tracer/ - updates are forthcoming as soon as my thesis
is submitted :)

To get involved, contact me at <mellerf@netvision.net.il>