Community and listings

Where we list ApertureAPI, in public

We think it is healthier to publish this list than to keep it internal. If you meet us in one of the rooms below, you can check here and see exactly what we planned to say before we said it. Nothing on this page is posted by an automated account, and every message is signed.

Registries, directories and package indexes

Communities we read and take part in

Two places we are deliberately not posting. The MCP Contributors Discord discourages marketing, and Lobsters is invite-only with a self-promotion rule we would rather respect than test. We read both. We do not post about ourselves in either.

What we would say, and where

Each message below is written for one specific room. They are different from each other because those rooms are different, not because we are testing variants.

image.sc forum — no promotional post

image.sc asks people not to use it as an advertising channel, and that rule is the reason the forum is worth anything. So we are not posting an announcement there, now or later.

What we do instead: answer hologram-reconstruction questions when we can actually help, without a link. If someone asks directly what we work on, this is the whole of it:

We work on ApertureAPI, which reconstructs digital holograms over HTTP. I did not want to drop a link into a thread that was not about us — if it is useful to you, it is at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs and there is an endpoint you can try without making an account. Happy to talk about the reconstruction itself either way. — ApertureAPI

Confocal Microscopy List — no promotional post

The oldest and most norm-heavy room on this list. Same policy: we participate in technical threads, we do not introduce ourselves with a product. If a thread turns to reconstruction software and a direct question is asked, the disclosure paragraph above is what we send.

MCP Contributors Discord — no promotional post

Marketing is explicitly discouraged there. We are present for protocol discussion only.

napari Zulip

Hello — we build ApertureAPI, an HTTP API that takes a digital hologram and returns a reconstruction. We are here mostly to listen, because the part that keeps biting us is the boring part: array conventions, dtype preservation, and keeping results bit-identical between runs so that a number someone measured last month still means the same thing today.

If you have a napari workflow where a reconstruction step is currently a local script you inherited and do not love, we would be glad to hear how it is shaped — and if you want to try ours against it, the quickstart is at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart and there is an endpoint that needs no account or key.

We would rather hear where it fails on your data than where it works on ours. — ApertureAPI

r/Optics

We built an HTTP API that reconstructs digital holograms — you post an interference pattern, you get amplitude, phase and a depth-resolved reconstruction back. It is physics-based wave propagation rather than a trained model, which we mention because it determines what it can and cannot do for you, not as a selling point.

Posting here because this subreddit will find the edges faster than we will. Off-axis carrier handling, sampling, and anything involving an unusual geometry are all places we expect to be told we are wrong.

There is a public endpoint that needs no account, key or email, so you can throw a hologram at it without signing up for anything: https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart

If it produces something wrong on your data, we would genuinely like the file and the setup — that is more useful to us than a compliment. — ApertureAPI

r/microscopy

If you have holographic or quantitative-phase data sitting on a drive and the reconstruction step is a script someone in the lab wrote years ago, this might save you an afternoon: we run ApertureAPI, an HTTP API that does the reconstruction and hands back phase and amplitude.

You can try it without an account — no key, no email — at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart.

We are not going to tell you it beats your script, because we have not seen your script or your instrument. What we would like is to find out where it falls over on real samples. If you try it and it disappoints, telling us so is the most useful thing you could do. — ApertureAPI

r/computervision

ApertureAPI is an HTTP API for digital hologram reconstruction: post an interference pattern, get amplitude, phase and a depth-resolved result.

The reason it might interest this subreddit specifically is that it is not a learned model — it is wave propagation, so the output is deterministic and the same input gives the same result rather than something that drifts with a checkpoint. That is a constraint as much as a feature, and it is worth knowing which one you want before you pick a tool.

Public endpoint, no account needed: https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart — ApertureAPI

r/mcp

We published an MCP server for ApertureAPI, which does digital hologram reconstruction — an agent hands it an interference pattern and gets back a reconstruction.

The part that might be useful to this subreddit regardless of whether you care about holography: the underlying endpoint needs no account, key or email, and we serve a SKILL.md and an llms.txt at the service root (https://api.apertureapi.com/SKILL.md, https://api.apertureapi.com/llms.txt), so an agent can read one file and integrate without a human setting up credentials first. We did that because watching an agent stall on a signup flow got old.

Docs: https://api.apertureapi.com/docs — the quickstart runs as a single curl.

Happy to hear if the skill file is missing something your setup needed. — ApertureAPI

scikit-image Zulip

Hello — we maintain ApertureAPI, an HTTP API for digital hologram reconstruction. We are here for the upstream conversation rather than to pitch: we care a lot about dtype preservation and reproducibility, since the arrays we hand back are things people measure against, and we would rather match the ecosystem's conventions than invent our own.

If we have got a convention wrong, we would like to know. Docs are at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs. — ApertureAPI

Hacker News (Show HN)

Show HN: ApertureAPI – reconstruct a digital hologram over HTTP, no account

ApertureAPI takes an optical interference pattern and returns amplitude, phase and a depth-resolved reconstruction. The reconstruction is physics-based wave propagation, not a trained model, so the same input gives you the same output.

You can try it without signing up for anything — no account, no API key, no email address. The quickstart is one curl command: https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart

What we are least sure about is how it behaves across the range of real instruments out there. We have validated against the data we have; we have not validated against yours, and we would rather say that plainly than imply otherwise. If you own a holographic rig and it produces something wrong, that report is the most valuable thing we could get today.

Happy to answer questions about the reconstruction, the failure modes, or why the public endpoint has no auth on it. — ApertureAPI

How to reach us

The quickstart is at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/quickstart and the full reference is at https://api.apertureapi.com/docs/api. The public reconstruction endpoint needs no account, no key and no email address. Our main site is https://apertureapi.com.

If you own a holographic instrument and want to try this against your own data, we are more interested in the cases where it fails than the cases where it works. Those are the ones that improve it.

— ApertureAPI