3 ms·
This is interesting zemax costs ~$5k, if you want up to date material and part catalogues that's a yearly fee. I wonder if MS also keeps those catalogues up to
by cycomanic 6y ago
This is interesting zemax costs ~$5k, if you want up to date material and part catalogues that's a yearly fee. I wonder if MS also keeps those catalogues up to date. This seems to largely be the selling arguments of the commercial offerings.
- analog31 6y agoI'm a long time Zemax user. The subscription is just a cost of doing business for my employer. It's cheap compared to hiring an optics consultant. ;-) But this is pretty common for specialized engineering software. My company maintains several seats of mechanical and electrical CAD software. Not surprisingly, the landscape of FOSS tools gets more and more sparse, the further you get away from software development. A problem in optics is that just having the software won't teach you optics unless you're already trained in an adjacent field such as physics. The people who can do it, can simply demand that the employer pay for the software. Oddly enough I'm interested in this package, and have bookmarked it. It's not like I need an alternative to Zemax, but that there are some ideas I'd like to explore that would benefit from further automation, but that don't need the breadth of features provided by Zemax. And maybe I'd like to try some things at home.
- brianguenter 6y agoOpticSim automatically downloads publicly available glass catalogs when you first build the package. The current list is Nikon, Schott, Sumita, Ohara, and Hoya. If you have glass files stored locally on your machine you can add the glass files to a sources file and the next time OpticSim is built it will include your glass files as well.