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Basic front view of plasma parameters version 4.

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What's New

• Provide your own Preset Values
• Input Tokamak Major and Minor Radii to Calculate Trapped Particle Fraction
• Easy Display of Additional Parameters
• Help Information Still Needs to be Written

Details

I have put a little work into a new plasma parameters widget and would like to get some feedback before putting it on the Apple Dashboard site. While the existing widget is already featured there, they only want final versions of widgets submitted. It would be best to get some community testing of this one before I submit it. Since this is a very basic item there is not much that can go wrong, but there is a lot of room for improvement in terms of layout, usability, and settings. In particular, I can hard code in more preset plasma conditions based on what people send to me.

Considering the population of plasma physicists in the world, selecting out those with Apple computers, and then further narrowing the group according to whether they have any interest in using this widget, we probably arrive at a number small enough to allow for including everyone's preset values.

Front side display after either setting the tokamak default, or placing the mouse over the infinity button at the bottom.

The first figure does not appear very different from the previous widget, except for the color change. The button with the infinity shape, ∞, is new. Rolling over this button with the mouse causes the display to show an alternative set of parameters. It always switches the display. For example, rolling over the button while viewing the widget in the top figure will cause a view like the one to the left. The input parameters are unchanged, but the outputs have disappeared and new items have taken their place. The R and a are input fields for the major and minor radius of a tokamak, respectively. The three items below the horizontal bar are the trapped particle fraction (tokamak), ftr, and the mean free paths for electrons (basic plasma), λe, and ions, λi.

As the image shows, there is plenty of room in this display to include more output parameters. I am open to suggestions, though they should be calculations that only require the standard input quantities (including the tokamak radii is fine).

Moving the mouse cursor away from the infinity button will return the display to the original view.

The info side features tokamak radii and inputs for a user defined preset.

Finally, the information side of the widget also has some new features. The accompanying figure shows some of these options. Placing a checkmark in the “Show Tokamak” box will cause the tokamak view to be the default display. This means that the view with the radii and mean free paths will be displayed first, and then placing the cursor over the infinity button will cause the alternate display, with all of the other output values, to show itself.

Typing numbers into the R and a fields will set the tokamak radii values as defaults. They will always automatically appear in the input fields. They can be changed within the input fields, but stopping and then restarting the widget will cause them to be replaced with the default values. As with the other number input fields, simply typing the values into the box is enough to set them, it is not necessary to press “Return”. These user preferences will update every time the value is changed.

The other fields on this side will be used for the “My Set” option in the preset list.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

Tags: dashboard widgets, plasma physics