There are a large number of softwares that can execute adaptive optics
simulation. Most of them,such as WaveTrain and CAOS, are commercial or
proprietary products, and their inner mechanism are not known to other
researchers (AlthoughCAOS is an open sourced software, but it is implemented in
the IDL, which is proprietary). Some other simulation softwares (LightPipes,
Arroyo,etc.) are open source, while these code are almost all written in
FORTRAN, or C/C++, and they have not good interfaces for other people to use.
Many of today’s codes (e.g. AOtools developed by tOSC) are written entirely or
partly in Matlab, which has the advantages of an extensive library of math
routines, very fast matrix operations, plenty of other toolboxes and very vell
graphical outputs. The main limitations of Matlab are the cost of the licenses
and the slow speed for non-matrix iterative calculations.
SciAO is an open source, cross-platform, and user-friendly toolbox based on the
Scilab / Scicos environment for modeling and simulation of wave optics,
especially the adaptive optics system.Although this toolbox is mainly be
designed to satisfy the requirement of AO simulations, we also moderately
consider the needs to some other optics simulation system (e.g. the simulation
of general Wave optics and imaging devises) and designed some software modules
for them, so this toolbox can also be used to simulating other optics problems
beyond the AO field.
Most of the programs of our SciAO toolbox are written by C/C++ language or based
on some excellent open source C/C++ libraries, so it is efficient and
cross-platform. At the same time, we also fully make use of the powerful
graphical and interface program ability, especially the dynamic modeler and
simulator (Scicos ) of the Scilab environment, so it is very easy for other
researchers or beginners to learn and use this toolbox to simulate their
peculiar adaptive or other optical problems. Our toolbox will be released under
open-sourced GPL license and all other people who are interested in this
software can download, modify, or use it if they abide this license.
In developing this tool we did not "reinvent the wheels". All of the
basic techniques and algorithms used in wave optics which had already been
implemented and tested for previous wave optics codes, and all of the
open-source code which we can acquire, can be used by our toolbox. Where it made
sense, we used the legacy or open-source code directly. In some cases minor
modifications were needed to satisfy integration requirements, and in some cases
it was simpler to rewrite the code. For open-source codes which we have used in
SciAO, we refer to Arroyo and LightPipes. (We have made some amall modification
to their original codes in order to let them accord with Scilab / Scicos
environment, or let them be able to cross-platform run under Microsoft Windows
and Gnu/Linux.) The authors Dr.Matthew Britton and Dr.Gleb Vdovin for developing
thease excellent software packages
