Get started¶

InertialSim is a Python library that supports development of advanced motion tracking applications by simulating inertial sensors. If you're familiar with Python, you can install InertialSim with pip, the Python package manager. See below.

Alternatively you can use a modern package manager like uv, which is used internally in InertialSim development and testing.

Licensing¶

InertialSim is commercial software and requires a license to access. If you are interested, get in touch!

Versions¶

InertialSim follows the semantic versioning standard: major.minor.patch. The latest version can be found here.

Prerequisites¶

InertialSim packages are hosted on Google Cloud Artifact Registry. Users should authenticate using the email address associated with their license.

If the email address is not already associated with a Google account, create one following the official instructions under "Use an existing email address". If using a Google account is not possible in your organization, reach out for alternatives.

Note

Email addresses must be associated with a Google account before license permissions can be granted, so reach out after completing this step and before completing the Install steps below.
Install the Google Cloud CLI for your operating system.
Ensure you have a supported version of Python. Currently, InertialSim requires Python 3.10 or above.

Install¶

Environment and package managers

It is a best practice and highly recommended to use a Python virtual environment tool like venv, virtualenv, pipx, or uv for development and testing.

See the following for more details on configuring and authenticating with custom package indexes. They include instructions for storing or caching package locations and authentication credentials: pip, uv, Google Artifact Registry.

Here is an example install using venv and pip (see the notes above for alternatives):

Authenticate.
```
gcloud auth login
```
Create and/or activate a virtual environment (make sure to use the correct Python version).
```
python -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
```

Install.

USER=oauth2accesstoken
TOKEN=$(gcloud auth print-access-token)
pip install --extra-index-url https://$USER:$TOKEN@us-python.pkg.dev/is-packages/inertialsim/simple "inertialsim"

Note: Windows users will need to adjust the shell syntax to cmd or PowerShell equivalents.

Install options¶

InertialSim can be installed with any of the following extras:

pip install "inertialsim[plot]"
pip install "inertialsim[examples]"

The [plot] extra includes dependencies necessary to use the inertialsim.plot module. The [examples] extra includes dependencies to run the interactive notebooks in the companion inertialsim/examples repository.

Next steps¶

From here you may wish to look at the Reference pages for useful preliminaries. They detail InertialSim's fundamental software and mathematical conventions. The Examples pages provide end to end examples that can bootstrap other applications. All examples are also available as interactive notebooks in the source code. The API reference contains detailed documentation of all public interfaces provided in the source code.