Create a notebook
Name it, choose a starting point, press one button. Starters are complete problems; an empty canvas is for when you know what you want.
Open the Lab. The Start a notebook card is the first card in the grid; your existing notebooks follow it.
Your screenshot · the Start a notebook card with a name typed in and the Start from list open.
The three things on the card
Name. The field suggests something like Heat in a bar. Leave it empty and the notebook takes the starter's own title. The name is what you see on the notebook's card, in the browser tab, and in the downloaded file name, so choose something you will recognise in three months. It can be up to 120 characters.
Start from. A list grouped by the type of equation:
| Group | Starter | What it contains |
|---|---|---|
| Hyperbolic | Burgers' shock formation | The standard PINN benchmark: a shock forming from a sine wave, on $x \in [-1, 1]$ |
| Hyperbolic | Standing wave | The wave equation $u_{tt} = u_{xx}$ with fixed ends, released from rest |
| Parabolic | Heat in a bar | $u_t = 0.1\,u_{xx}$ with cold ends and a sine initial profile |
| Elliptic | Steady heat conduction in a plate | A unit plate with $T = \sin(\pi x)$ on the top edge and $0$ on the others |
| Elliptic | Poisson on a square | $\nabla^2 u = -2\pi^2 \sin(\pi x)\sin(\pi y)$ with zero on all four edges |
| Elliptic | Laplace on a disc | A steady field on a circle with a varying value on the rim |
| An empty canvas | Nothing at all |
Create notebook. The notebook is created and opens straight away.
Starter or empty canvas?
Every starter is a complete, wired problem: all the way from the Domain block to the Visualisation and Report blocks. If you press Generate code on a fresh starter, the file it produces runs. That makes starters the best way to read a working problem before you build your own, and the best base for changing one thing at a time.
An empty canvas is for building from scratch, which is what Build a notebook from an empty canvas does.
A suggestion
On your first visit, open Poisson on a square. Look at which blocks are there and how they are wired, then come back to this tour. The pages that follow will make more sense with a real picture in front of you.
Getting back to a notebook
The Lab page lists your notebooks as cards, most recently edited first. Each card shows the name, the one-line summary, how many blocks it has and when it was last edited. Click the card to open it. The address of an open notebook looks like …/lab/notebook/?nb=<name>, so you can bookmark it. It only works in the browser that holds it.
The next page walks through the studio screen you land on: finding your way around.