Getting started¶

This page briefly explains how to get started with a very simple example using PyTornado’s command line interface. Notice that a more detailed user guide can be found here: User guide

First, open a terminal and try to simply run the command pytornado (without any arguments). A short help page should show up. One of the available arguments is --make-example which we will use in this tutorial to create a minimal working example. Now, in your terminal run:

pytornado --make-example

This command creates a folder named pytornado in your current directory. Change into this folder (cd pytornado) and then run

pytornado -v --run settings/template.json

The flag -v tells PyTornado to go into verbose mode. You should see some text output on your terminal screen. We use --run to execute a VLM analysis. The argument is the path to PyTornado’s main settings file. If everything worked correctly, you should see a plot of a simple rectangular wing.

Fig. 2 Pressure plot for a simple rectangular wing with deflected control surfaces

While creating this minimalistic example, several directories and files were created. Feel free to explore the different files. However, don’t be worried if you don’t understand everything yet. We will give more detailed instructions on the following pages.

Troubleshooting¶

Linux¶

If you run pytornado and get a pytornado: command not found error, try to add ~/.local/bin to your PATH variable:

echo 'PATH=$PATH:~/.local/bin' >> ~/.bashrc
source ~/.bashrc