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                                          Statement

Opticsbenchui (http://www.opticsbenchui.com) promotes the use of Open source software in research laboratories and companies having interest in optics bench experiments. 
	
                                         Motivation

Optics bench experiments mainly require software in the two following situations:

1) manage individual control and/or data acquisition of each independent device.  It is necessary for manually adjusting optics components on the bench (motor, camera, laser diode, shutter, analog to digital, digital to analog etc..).  This may not be a problem from the software point of view since any commercial hardware device has its own control and/or data acquisition software shipped with it.

2) perform global control like automated scans or control loops involving cooperation between hardware devices on the bench. It requires data and control coordination between heterogeneous devices. Only an integrated software solution can satisfy this point. 

There exist software commercial frameworks providing solutions  for point 2). They may seem attractive because of their apparent simplicity, especially to project managers not expert in software who often start new projects with a simplified context in mind.  However, experience tells that with time, increasing experiment complexity requires a growing level of expertise to handle such commercial frameworks. Additional complications arise due to a lack of software engineering vision impeding software components re-use and modifications. In the long term, the critical mass necessary to reach a sustainable level of expertise risks to be unattainable. 


                                  Choosing Open Source Framework

What is the alternative ? It is opportune to present Open Source as the right framework for optics laboratories and companies. 
1) Open Source is free, fully accessible and modifiable which is to our opinion the best basis model to sustain increasing complexity in the long term.
2) Open Source original mission is to be as generic and compatible as possible with the largest range of hardware. 
3) Open Source community has always grown bigger and stronger since the beginnings. It can be considered today mature enough to bring high-performance solutions to the most demanding experiments.  Biggest and most complicated experiments like LHC at Cern are true incubators of  Open Source software technologies. Big industrial hardware companies have understood that and provide Open Source drivers compatible with their hardware products on a regular basis. 
4) Open Source is the ideal bridge between academic and business realities. Students and trainees already know a bit of academic programming languages. A student will feel immediately comfortable building his application using Open Source resources.

Laboratories and companies may keep in mind that the decision to be taken on the software framework will have important consequences in the long term. We are convinced that Open Source is the best solution. 
In this perspective, we offer our support for Open Source, like providing hardware and software technology watch studies, providing trainings methods and tools in all software aspects around Open Source (programming language, package management and environment). Our support is targeted towards the optics community within which we build our Open Source experience every day.  

                                    OpticsBenchUI software

In this package we provide an illustration of the statement above through the OpticsBenchUI software release which aims at demonstrating the power of Open source to control and acquire data from an optics bench experiments. This software will allow users to work with motors, digital firewire camera, DAC, configure automated scans, and save data to files.  
See the INSTALL file for installation.