Once my optics bench is finished, I plan on measuring all the lenses I have on hand and building something with them. To do that, I’ll have to try out designs using software. But since the design space is limited by what I actually have on hand, I have the opportunity to write a tool that uses the constraint of what I have “in stock” to reach a design goal.
The way I envision this now is some type of Genetic Boxcar2D but for optics. And the first step to that is a web technology ray tracer and optical system design tool. After all, the genetic algorithm is more or less tweaking all the knobs I’d be tweaking manually in such a tool.
Here’s a spread from my note book where I am thinking about the best way to model the domain problem of an optical system.
And here’s me thinking about it some time between PAX (West) 2017 and my trip to Italy in the fall.
Here’s a page from 2015 – at least before an HCDE info session on Oct 15th.
I know I’ve been thinking about this for at least a decade, but I haven’t found my original notes, so we’ll leave it at that.
Not to self: I need to make an index to all my notebooks.