FerroCella

FerroCella is the official designation for the standalone, high-fidelity, open-source physics simulator for the AetherOS project. Its purpose is to provide a rich, dynamic, and physically realistic external environment that AetherOS agents can perceive and interact with.

FerroCella serves as the canonical "simulated reality" for the ecosystem. It is the primary tool for testing and developing agents before they are deployed to physical hardware.

The "Ship of Theseus" Strategy

The development of FerroCella is a central part of the project's Ship of Theseus philosophy. It is designed to be a near-perfect digital "plank" that can stand in for the physical ferrocell rig.

The AetherOS Hardware Abstraction Layer can connect to FerroCella via a network API. When the physical rig is complete, the HAL can be switched to connect to the real hardware's sensors and actuators with no changes to the core AetherOS logic. This allows for a seamless transition from a simulated "body" to a physical one.

Core Physics Engines

To achieve high fidelity, FerroCella is being built using the JAX high-performance computing library. Its simulation is a synthesis of multiple interacting physics engines.

• Electromagnetism: The 3D magnetic field is calculated using the Biot-Savart Law, summing the contributions from thousands of discretized segments of the energized Kepler Control Grid.
• Fluid & Thermal Dynamics: The ferrofluid itself is modeled using a simplified Navier-Stokes fluid solver, which accounts for viscosity, pressure, and the magnetic body force. This is coupled with a heat equation that simulates thermal effects from the LED array.
• Optics: The final visual output is generated by a light transport model that simulates how light scatters through the magnetically-aligned and physically moving nanoparticles in the fluid.

Architectural Role

FerroCella operates as a standalone server, accessible via a real-time API (using Flask and WebSockets). This decouples the computationally-intensive physics simulation from the AetherOS runtime.

An AetherOS instance running in `remote_jax_sim` mode will receive a continuous stream of `SEXTET` and visual grid data from the FerroCella server. This data is used to "ground" its internal FluxCore entities, providing the chaotic, external component required for Unified Non-Determinism.