Torch Lens Maker receives NLnet grant

Posted on 2025-01-05

Author: Victor Poughon

I'm happy to announce that Torch Lens Maker has received a grant from NLnet! As part of the NGI0 Commons Fund, and with support from the European Commission's Next Generation Internet program. Learn more at the NLnet project page.

What this means in practice

I will be working full-time on Torch Lens Maker for the first 6 months of 2026! This does not mean that the financial future of Torch Lens Maker is 100% secure, but it enables a strong commitment to the project and many more features ahead of us.

What this grant enables

During this time, development effort with be focused on the following areas:

• Improve optical modeling capabilities, in particular for historical imaging lenses designs
• Utilities to enable easy convertion of paraxial data into exact representation
• Expand tlmviewer capabilities in particular for sequential systems
• Support cemented lenses in the API
• Implement ray aiming
• Implement mechanical configuration sampling to enable modeling zoom lenses
• Reach 100% support for GPU optimization
• Improve jupyter notebook integration
• Improve the optimization API to support more advanced use cases
• Expand examples with more demo notebooks

Introducing Torch Lens Maker development blog

As part of this new grant I'm also creating this development blog. This will help communication about the project, new releases, and other ideas!

You can subscribe to the blog with RSS.

Happy coding! 💻