Mag-O-Mat tutorial -> Starting Mag-O-Mat

Starting Mag-O-Mat from within Magsimus

Start Mag-O-Mat from within Magsimus as follows:  From the main menu make the selection Special->Tools->Material micro-property editor (Mag-O-Mat). Mag-O-Mat loads atop your Magsimus window as shown in Fig. 4.

Fig. 4. The screen after starting Mag-O-Mat.

The various parts of the Mag-O-Mat user interface are highlighted in Fig. 5.  We will learn more about how these areas function throughout this tutorial.  For now we give the following brief overview of them (according to the numbering of the figure):

1. Component selection frame. The array component to work with is selected here.

2. Mode frame. The manner of applying patterns (manually, using shapes or using masks) is specified here.

3. Shape inputs (or Mask) frame. This frame contains information about a shape or a mask depending on the patterning mode selected in the Mode frame.

4. Material properties editor and Array-layout controls.  This is a tabbed area containing controls for specifying the material properties of selected array-map regions and for facilitating access to all internal and external regions of the array component.

5. Array Map box. A planar map of the array in form of a rectangular grid of its cells is displayed here.

Fig. 5. Mag-O-Mat user interface.

The array component to work with is specified in the Component selection frame by specifying a combination of its group name (in the Group list) and its name (in the Component list). The Component list contains the members of the selected group. Only those groups containing material-array components are listed in the Group box, and only the array components of a group are listed in the Component box. For example, notice that only Normal array component is listed for the group Group of different types of components, even though it contains a probe component and a field-array component. Field arrays do not represent material objects - they are instead used for defining regions of space in which field variations are computed.

Clicking the Refresh button updates the contents of these lists. An annotation of the grid-size and overall linear dimensions of a selected component (which can come in handy during shape-mode setting of properties) is printed at the lower space of the frame.

Round up

In this topic you learned how to launch Mag-O-Mat from within a Magsimus session. The following is a round up of other ways to start the program:

After Mag-O-Mat loads, its window by default will always lie on top of the Magsimus session regardless of whether it has the focus (in Windows' speak ) or not. This is indicated by the fact that the menu item Options->Display apps always on top is checked by default. You can get rid of this behavior by un-checking the menu item. Generally, you may find it convenient in this tutorial to use the default behavior. Thus, Mag-O-Mat will remain in the fore while you carry out some task in it; you then minimize it if you need to carry out a task in Magsimus and restore the Mag-O-Mat window back again to continuing working on it.