Last year I got interested in diffractive optics after a presentation at my local astronomy club. I set out to build a photon sieve solar telescope and wrote a small program to design the optics. The first version took me a while to write. I've got no physics background to speak of. This tool is a rewrite, which took me a weekend to get to feature parity. It has some rough edges, but it's largely functional. It outputs dxf and gerber files and can do some basic layout to simplify ordering multiple lenses on a single photomasks.
Along the way I found that KiCAD's GerbView wasn't standards compliant and would stop rendering after about 10k apertures. One developer graciously spruced up my patch request and submitted it.
