PyOpticL – Code-to-CAD optical system engineering

github.com

23 points·cinquemb··5 comments

Great idea, but the hard-coded imperial units make this very difficult to use for most of the world. Also the plugin still appears to be extremely buggy and unfinished.

It took me less than a day to start to be productive on my fork [0] for what i wanted to do. The default spacial units are actually microns (but yes they have their[1] examples multiplied by the inch conversion) and the wavelength stuff is in meters. But yes, technically its v0.0.1 so still rough around the edges.

Considering the vast majority of money in the space going into QEC software, I'm so grateful for their work. Was so much easier than trying to everything from scratch with my limited CAD work over the years.

[0] https://i.ibb.co/vCdFC7sp/iso-sep-debugging1.png

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14957

Am I to believe someone smart enough to developing these kinds of optical systems will find it very difficult to multiply one number by another to convert to metric?

The modules physically won't fit. American optical tables have screw holes with 1 inch spacing and some imperial thread, whereas the rest of the world has 25 mm spacing with M6 threads. Having to manually fiddle with the pattern sort of defeats the purpose.

Late reply but I hadn't considered that, it's an interesting problem, it might be worthwhile to just buy a second American-standard optical table, if the cost is only a few thousand dollars, and most of the money is spent on other hardware and labor, assuming this software actually saves anyone any time.

Then again, this is coming from a guy who had to call nearly every fastener supplier in a country in order to source a specific kind of countersunk UNC screw to fit foreign hardware he ordered. That still stings.

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