Welcome to the Optiland Community!

4 months ago

448

Hello everyone!

We want to give you all a warm welcome to the Optiland official website.

What is Optiland?
For those just discovering us, Optiland is a fully open-source optical design and simulation software tool written entirely in Python. Our mission is to provide a powerful, accessible, and highly customizable alternative to traditional closed-source optical modelling tools.

It has been extremely rewarding to see Optiland's continued growth over the last year. Motivated by the community, and for the community, we built this space to bring together optical engineers, researchers, students, and Python developers who are passionate about the future of open-source optical design.

You may notice that we have different features waiting for you here in the website - the motivation behind this was the lack of a community hub that brings people from different backgrounds together in one place to discuss optics-related topics, in an easy, interactive, and non-overwhelming way.

How to get the most out of this space:

Blog/Expert Corner: as an open source project, transparency is of course a main thought to our workflows. we decided to create a Blog space, where you will be able to find: a technical writing corner, where we deep dive into some specific implementation we considered worthwhile sharing with you; an expert corner, where we invite researchers and industry experts to publish articles, tutorials, and case studies about optical engineering and Python development.

Competitions/Challenges: We are partnering with universities and companies to host real-world optical design challenges. Test your skills, solve complex problems, and share your solutions. You will be able to submit your models directly through the platform and compete on the live leaderboard. It could be a great chance for you to get known in the field!

Show & Tell: Did you just minimize your RMS spot size using a clever combination of EvenAsphereGeometry and the TorchAdamOptimizer? Post a screenshot of your spot diagram and your Python script here! We will be featuring the best designs on our main Gallery page.

oopsie bug?: Stuck on a gradient flow issue? Not sure how to set up your OptimizationProblem? Ask it here. We are all here to help each other master the library.

Note: If you are interested in contributing to the codebase, keep in mind that even though you can share specific ideas here, we prefer to discuss architectural changes, new backend support, and other more code-related issues/additional features in the official GitHub repo.

Your First Mission: React to this message! 👇

The best communities are built on knowing who you are working with. Reply to this thread and let us know:

Who are you and what do you do?
What is your primary interest in Optiland (e.g., academic research, industry lens design, open-source software development)?
Are you team NumPy or team PyTorch? 😉 (or maybe jax..)

Welcome aboard, and happy tracing!

Discussion 4

Misha

@misha

edited3 months ago

Awesome new website! Very excited to be part of this growing community :)

I'm a beginner optomechanical engineer in a small startup, and I've been using Optiland for a few weeks now, to expand my (so far null) understanding of optics. I've been loving it so far!

Maybe it can even replace Zemax for our team. We will of course donate to the project if it brings value to us!

jorb

@jacques_orbiton

edited3 months ago

Hello, nice to discover there is a website now !!

I am an engineering student that is reaching the end of his cursus. I have been following the project for more than a year now and hopefully I will get some time to contribute soon !!

I was planning on sharing the project with a few of my teachers at IOGS (France). Would you be down to get in touch if they accept to have some student work on specific parts of the development ?

I'm stoked to see the potential in this project grow day after day.

cy@

ntap

@ntap

3 months ago

Hello!

Nice to see the project evolving!

I've been a user since last november. I am an engineer working with all kinds of spectroscopy measurements, and although I am not very familiar with optical design I am very used to patching systems together (thorlabs contraptions etc...).

I use optiland mostly to simulate existing systems and look for places where performance could be improved. Also a lot to educate myself. So definitely an industry user. I like contributing to open source projects when I get the chance, so I would like to try a first PR when I am more familiar with the project and its code (1-2 year. A first idea would be support from custom apertures in the zemax import module).

Thank you so much for creating such a great project.

Also, definitely team numpy, but open-minded :)

ademd

@ademd

30 days ago

Hello, pretty nice project.

I'm currently a french post doc in japan and I'm trying to learn optical design on my own.

Would be very happy to help this project to evolve

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