The guided tour: your first model in three minutes

The first time you open Konjugate you face an empty canvas, and the sequence that matters is not obvious from it: a node holds states, a relationship connects two nodes with an equation, and a run produces results you can scrub through. The guided tour walks you through that sequence in the real interface, in about three minutes, and leaves you with a model of your own. This page says what it does, so that you can decide whether to take it and know what to expect.

How it starts

On the very first launch of the desktop app, the tour starts by itself in the project window. The Welcome window is held back on that first launch, so the tour has the screen to itself.

You can skip it with Skip tour on that first card, or with the Skip tour link on every step after it. A skip says where to find the tour again. Closing the window or quitting part way counts as a skip, and Konjugate never starts it by itself a second time, not even after an update.

To take it later, open the Welcome window from the Konjugate button in the title bar. Its first card is Take the 3-minute tour, always, however many times the tour has been taken. It starts the tour on a new, empty project, and if the project you have open has unsaved changes you are asked to save first, so the tour never touches your model without asking.

The web edition has no Welcome window. It offers the tour once on a first visit and again whenever the Konjugate button is pressed.

What you build

A heater and a block, joined by one relationship. It is the smallest model that shows every part of the workflow: two nodes with one state each, one equation, one run and one results view. Heat flowing from a heater into a block needs no domain knowledge, and the result, the block warming towards the heater, is obvious at a glance. The relationship points one way, so the heater holds its temperature. It is a source, not a second body that cools.

There are eight steps. Each says what to do in a sentence and why in one more, and the card moves on when you have done it, not when you press a button. A card has a Next button only at the start and at the end, where there is nothing to do.

Step by step

Step 1: Add a node. The first step points at the Add button. Open the Add menu and choose Node.

Steps 2 and 3: Define the two nodes. The first is named Heater, with one state, Temperature (symbol temperature), starting at 350 K. The second is Block, with the same state starting at 300 K. The card shows what to type.

Steps 2, 3 and 5 offer a Fill this in for me button for people who would rather watch than type. It types the step's values and leaves the builder's own Create button to you, so you still do the step.

The two nodes appear in the same place on the canvas, one on top of the other. The card for the next step reminds you to drag one of them aside before you go on, so that both are easy to see and to click later.

Step 4: Connect them. An edge is a relationship: an equation that says how one node changes another. Open the Add menu, choose Edge, and make it go from Heater to Block.

Step 5: Write the equation. Enter k·(sourceTemperature − targetTemperature). The block warms at a rate proportional to how much hotter the heater is. k is the Coefficient parameter that the edge builder adds for you under Custom parameters, set to 1. The reference buttons under the equation insert the names for you, so you do not have to type them, and you never need to know LaTeX because the tour points at the visual editor. The card also asks you to check that Updates says target.temperature, so that the equation changes the block and not the heater.

Step 6: Run it. Press Run, set Run until to 10 s and press Start.

Step 7: Plot the temperature. The run is done and its results are on the canvas. Click the Block to open its editor, which plots how its temperature changed over the run.

Step 8: Watch it happen. Drag the timeline. The marker moves along the plot, and Block warms from 300 K towards the heater's 350 K.

The tour then ends with a short card labelled Bonus step, since the model is already built and run by then. It suggests saving the model from the toolbar if you want to keep it, and opening a finished model from the Examples menu to study. On the desktop app it also points at the Extensions dialog, where add-ons chart results and plugins add new kinds of nodes and edges. The model you built is an ordinary model, so everything on this page after the tour applies to it.

If you go off the script

The tour checks what is true instead of trusting that you followed the path. If you delete the Heater after step 2, the tour notices that step 2 no longer holds and offers Go back to step 2 instead of waiting for something that cannot happen. Nothing blocks you from panning, rotating, opening other panels or renaming things while a step is on, and the ring follows its target if it is still on screen. If you closed a panel the step needs, the card says where to find it.

The card is not fixed in one place, since the editors open at the sides and the timeline sits at the bottom. It takes the first of four corners that covers neither the control the step points at nor anything you are working in, stays put while that is still clear, and can be dragged by its title to anywhere else, where it then stays.

Where to go from here

"Getting started with Konjugate" builds a similar hot plate and room air model by hand, with more on each step. "Running a simulation" covers what the run dialog offers.