Third and fourth-week report

During the third week, after having a good grip on the project I moved on to working on the most important part of the project which were the entry points.

What are entry points?

PyBaMM provides a variety of predefined parameter sets and models that can be used for different battery chemistries and configurations and simulations. These sets include parameters for various battery components and conditions, ensuring accurate simulations. In PyBaMM, a third-party parameter set can be manually added by creating a Python package and mapping it in pyproject.toml under the [project.entry-points.pybamm_parameter_sets] group. This would then load the parameter set through the parameter_sets instance within PyBaMM which could be then accessed by a user.

Problems with third-party entry points

Due to the lack of extensive programming knowledge, especially in the area of the Python development ecosystem, researchers using PyBaMM find it difficult to set up a python package and add their entry points to the project. That’s where my project comes in, what if there was a way you could set up a python package that accommodates the features of PyBaMM and you could initialise it with one command? Later you could add your third-party parameter sets and models in that package and test it! Without having to go through the overwhelming hassles of setting up a python package for your third-party parameter sets.

The solution

The solution was a cookiecutter template with entry points API, that a user could use to add and map their own third-party parameter_sets. With this API you could access your own parameter_sets and pass them to PyBaMM directly without any type conversions.

Demonstration

## First install cookiecutter using pip
pip install cookiecutter
## Generate a project using cookiecutter 
cookiecutter pybamm-cookiecutter/
## Install the generated project in editable mode using pip
cd pybamm-cookiecutter
nox -s dev 
## Or alternatively 
pip install -e .[dev]
## Now that the package is installed locally, you can access it in Python shell

import pybamm_cookiecutter
list(pybamm_cookiecutter.parameter_sets)
# Will return a list of parameter_sets in entry point
['Chen2020', ...]
# Parameter set can be accessed using the parameter_sets entry point
ps = pybamm_cookiecutter.parameter_sets["Chen2020"]

This is similar to how parameter sets instance works in PyBaMM and doesn’t require adaptation or learning new methods to use this. You can refer the full documentation here.

Summary of my contributions

• Added parameter_sets instance, a parameter set (Chen2020) and a few nox-sessions for tests and editable installation of the generated project - PR #15