[python-control-announce] python-control 0.8.2 now available

[Murray, R. M. <mu...@cd...>]

Version 0.8.2 of the python-control toolbox is now available for download on GitHub, as well as via pip and conda.  This is mainly a maintenance release with lots of small bug fixes and performance improvements, plus a few new features (dynamic sisotool, latex output for state space systems in Jupyter notebooks, step_info, etc).  A short list of changes is appended to the bottom of this message.  

Installation instructions:

pip install slycot	# optional
pip install control

You should get slycot v0.3.3 and python-control v0.8.2.  In order to install slycot via pip you will need to have a Fortran compiler on your system.  Note that python-control depends on numpy, scipy, and matplotlib.

Binary installations are available using conda and conda-forge:

conda install -c conda-forge control

Slycot should be installed automatically, without the need for a Fortran compiler (support for Windows builds of slycot are coming soon; stay tuned…).

Documentation is available at

 http://python-control.readthedocs.org/

NOTE FOR MacOS USERS: There are some issues with the way that the matplotlib backend works and some people (including me -:) have noticed crashes with the default settings using conda downloads.  This appears to be a matplotlib/MacOS issue, which you can fix it by setting the MPLBACKEND environment variable to TkAgg

 export MPLBACKEND="TkAgg” 

More info here: https://matplotlib.org/faq/osx_framework.html

-richard

* Fixed a number of small bugs , including discrete time simulations (bnavigator), integer values in state space matrics (don4get), missing zeros on pole/zero plots (Sup3rGeo)

* First cut at a new step_info() function, similar to MATLAB (joaoantoniocardoso)

* Added a new function for dynamically setting gain in sisotool (icam0)

* Anti-stabilizing solutions for Riccati equations are now available (dbacc)

* Printout out state space systems in Jupyter notebooks now formats using LaTeX (alchemyst)

* Additional performance and visualiation improvements: _remove_useless_states (adm78), margins on Bode plots ( icam0), improved damping lines in discrete pzmap (Sup3rGeo)

* List of all changes in this release: https://github.com/python-control/python-control/compare/0.8.1...0.8.2

* Special thanks to Jason Moore (moorepants) for help with debugging the conda-forge recipe.