Accomplishments this week:

My mentor detected a mistake in the previous PR I provided, so I pushed one PR - 269 which addressed the pytest argument problem. Aside from that, I tried Pyvista as a viable STL manipulation Python library.

The team convened on Zoom to discuss next steps, and various tasks were assigned.

What's Next:

First and foremost, I will correct my error (issue - 271) of having the pytests compare the result values to the kernel outputs of the same function; rather, they should be compared to manually crafted/analytically validated values. Moving forward, I will work on extending the contact module to sphere and rod (issue - 266) while also working on'meshclass'(issue - 270).

Accomplishments this week:

I pushed two PR's - 267, 262 that resolved and closed the issue 99. I also looked into possible mesh manipulation Python packages.

The team also held a Zoom discussion to narrow down the mesh manipulation tool options.

What's next:

I'll write a Python class to import stl and obj files into Pyelastica geometry and attempt to help with the issue-266.

The coding phase began this week, and the team held another meeting to strategize the development.

Accomplishments this week:

I drafted another PR regarding issue no. - 99, 261, with which the specific functions unit tests are now complete. I also learned about code coverage using Codevec, as my mentor helped me identify that even though the test was written correctly, it was not testing all of the relevant code sections due to the arguments; this issue was eventually resolved.

The team also met via Zoom to discuss the ground implementation (what and how) of the contact module.

What's next:

I will continue to work on the issue 99 and finish it positively by this week; other than this I will be researching to find the best python - stl/mesh modulation packages for contact module implementation.

According to the GSoC'23 official timeline, today marks the end of the community bonding period and the start of the coding period.

During the community bonding phase, I accomplished the following:

I found the community bonding phase to be quite reassuring as I got to know the community and the PyElastica staff better. We had a zoom call, and interacting with the team was extremely exciting; we introduced ourselves and discussed the flow of things; it was decided to keep the pace as convenient as possible, and a communication medium was chosen.

I was entrusted with completing the #99-unit tests for contact module. This is designed to help me understand the contact module implementation in pyelastica - numba.

I drafted 2 PR's for the same, which were merged #257 and #258.

What is next:

I will continue to work on the issue - 99 as the task 3 and 4 are still unfinished.

Challenges I faced:

There were no out-of-the-box issues for me, but manual debugging of the test cases took a long time because I was unfamiliar with the input structure of the functions.