Mike Lampton

[dibyendumajumdar]

Hi @jenlampton

Sad to hear that Mike Lampton passed away.
I was fortunate to connect with him a few times recently as I was interested in BeamFour,
For your info - I have a version of BeamFour that I work on in my spare time - https://github.com/BeamFour/Beam42.

I am glad to see that you are going to look after this project.

Regards
Dibyendu

[jenlampton]

Hi @dibyendumajumdar,

Thank you so much for all your work on BeamFour! It's so nice to see dad's work living on. Would you be interested in contributing your changes back to the original project, and/or would you be interested in becoming a maintainer there?

Since there will be no future updates from Mike, it would be wonderful to include your updates.

(If your project has diverged too far from the original, I would be happy to add your changes onto a separate branch, rather than attempting to merge the two back together)

[dibyendumajumdar]

Hi @jenlampton

I feel that BeamFour is a valuable project and it would be good to be able to maintain it.

My initial goal was to:

• Add modern build mechanism
• Reorg the code so that the optical calculations are separated from the GUI, so that the optical analysis part is reusable and can sit behind a different UI - for instance a Web UI.
• Add tests mainly to ensure that nothing breaks due to above, and also to allow future changes.
• Add more documentation and examples.
• Add some method of specifying the rays in the model in a more automated way - rather than having to specify them manually.

As I work on this as a hobby and have not had much time recently, progress is very slow unfortunately.

I am happy to contribute my changes so far - and I agree that maybe its better to put this in a separate branch - or ensure that the original branch remains as is.

I am certainly keen to ensure that the project lives on; happy to help in any way that works.

Mike sent me some additional examples that are referred in the docs but were not in the git repo.
If you are able to locate the source for the 208 version of the doc, that would be great, as I only have a PDF version for it. The doc version is 190.