Authors: Clemens Anschütz [email protected] He Zhuang [email protected] Procrastination next level!

In short: LaserCAD helps you quickly prototyping and scripting your optical setup with as few commands as possible in the language of geometric optics and a ton of default values. It approximates the ray tracing and shows you a 3D view of everything in FreeCAD.

The creed is:

1. Make the common case simple.
2. The user should be able to set everything in the script, but the default values should also be set so well that it is not necessary.
3. The code should be designed in such a way that you know where to reprogram something if necessary. (OK, let's see.)

• Install FreeCAD

• Have any kind of python interpreter and a numpy version.

• Download the repository to an arbitrary location

git clone https://github.com/klee-mens/LaserCAD.git

Now you can execute e.g. the /tutorial/0_Opening.py in your interpreter. You should get some text output like

The geometric object <Composed_Mount:unnamed> is drawn to the position[108.51854, 264.70476,  80.     ] with the direction [-0.95766,  0.2566 , -0.13053]

and many more lines. When you open the exact same file in FreeCAD and execute it as a macro by pressing on the green arrow or F6 you get a new FreeCAD document with the 3D model looks like this:

After that, you can continue executing the other tutorials and tests. Some may take a few seconds, but most likely, the computation time is less than a minute. In the manual folder, you can find some more or less useful texts about the program and the ideas behind it. Some other documents may follow.

In each executable script, the first lines import the location of LaserCAD in the sys.path list so that python and FreeCAD can find the package. While I am sure that there exists a better way of installing it, ... I have no clue how to do it. So for the moment, make sure that every executable script has these lines on top and is in the work directory or somewhere in the LaserCAD package itself.

For the best support from your python IDE I can recommend copying the LaserCAD folder in your standard python search path, so, for example, side by side with the numpy package.

Just to show some of the capabilities of LaserCAD you can see the following examples in the manual under how-to-build-a-white-cell and how-to-build-a-stretcher:

Have fun!