How to build a custom unit cell from CSV - nTop

Question:

How can I build a custom unit cell with a line segment’s start and end points? How do you build a custom unit cell from CSV?

Applies to:

Custom Unit Cell
Lattices

Answer:

Create your input CSV file. In this example, I will use a CSV file with the following Header where (x1,y1,z1) are the start points and (x2,y2,z2) are the endpoints of the line segments.

x1,y1,z1,x2,y2,z2

Open nTop, and add an Import Table block to import your CSV file into nTop

The import table block

Now, use a combination of Extract Column as Text and Scalar from Text blocks to get the values in CSV as Scalars and Multiply with units of your choice.

Using the Scalar from Text and Extract Column as Text blocks to extract the data from the imported table. The Multiply block is used to apply units to the values

Repeat the above step by copy-pasting the above block and changing the Header to the respective ones for all six columns, and you will have x1, y1, z1, and x2, y2, z2.

Generating line segments from the imported CSV data

We now have to convert the Line Segments into graphs to use them as input to the Custom Unit Cell block.

A custom unit cell being generated from the line segments

And that’s it; you have successfully made your Custom Unit Cell from a CSV file.

Keywords:

question custom csv unit cell table