We are happy to announce another alpha release of Brian2 (version number 2.0a7). Major changes introduced since the last release:

A workaround that makes Brian2 work with the latest version of sympy (0.7.4) which introduced a bug in their differential equation solver.
A C++ version of the SpikeQueue, the data structure responsible for the spike transmission. This feature needs a working C++ compiler and will lead to a performance gain.
Faster synapse updates in pure numpy/Python for STDP-like rules
A more flexible approach for importing the brian2 package that should allow for different programming styles (see the documentation).

Please report any comments/questions you may have to the brian-development mailing list

How to get Brian2?

Brian2 is available on the python package index, therefore you can install it using easy_install or pip:

easy_install brian2
pip install brian 2  # older versions of pip
pip install --pre brian2  # newer versions of pip

Alternatively, you can directly download the package from the package index and install it yourself using python setup.py install (if you are using Python 2.x, simply running it from the source directory also works).

Finally, you can also clone the git repository at:
https://github.com/brian-team/brian2

Note that the package is called brian2, not brian, therefore it does not interfere with an existing Brian installation and trying out Brian2 will not affect your existing Brian simulations.

Documentation

You can find documentation for Brian2 at readthedocs: http://brian2.readthedocs.org

Note that the user documentation is still quite incomplete, you’ll find a lot of information in the reference documentation, though.