Anywhere Light Goes™ Blog
A blog about optical design, build, test and more.
Designing for Molded Glass Aspheres
In the world of optical design aspheric elements have been widely used for decades. The first commercial use of glass aspheric lenses was in cine lenses produced by Elgeet (now Navitar) in 1956. The venerable Polaroid Swinger (1965) and the following SX-70 (1972, shown below) used molded plastic lenses and were manufactured in millions of units. Today molded aspheric plastic lenses are in every cell phone. Figure 1 - Polaroid SX-70 camera An aspheric lens element is one where the surface form departs from a sphere. Aspheric lenses are more challenging to design, manufacture, and test - however they provide significant benefits that make them highly desirable to the optical designer. Aspheric lenses generate fewer aberrations (better image quality) while...
Product Development Strategies for Electro-Optical Systems – Fail Fast vs. Moonshot – Part II
Read Part 1 In our last post we highlighted product develop strategies for high-end optical subsystems. In this post we’ll move to the other extreme – ultra low-cost optics in mass produced systems. Consumer Grade Products To start, we should appreciate that while a mass market optical system may not have the performance of a DNA sequencer, the product development tradespace can be just as challenging. Optikos has regularly designed optical systems for toys; what could be simpler? Toys require next-to-nothing manufacturing costs, typically require compact packaging, must exhibit decent optical performance (better than you may think), and have to survive being thrown in the toy bin or run over by the Barbie 4-wheeler. In short, toys are not easy...
Product Development Strategies for Electro-Optical Systems – Fail Fast vs. Moonshot – Part I
If you work in product development you’ve heard the mantra “fail fast, fail early, fail often”, or similar. A novel goal, and great when building digital software products where iteration may take a matter of weeks or even days. However, how effective is this strategy in optical product development where custom optical components regularly exceed 12-week lead times and tens of thousands of dollars? No 3D printer exists for precision optics (yet). We might contrast fail fast with the “moonshot” approach – when you may have one chance for a successful product launch (literally). In spaceborne systems it is common to spend years on design and analysis, modeling validation, and build and test. For example, the James Webb Space Telescope...
Lens Element Pricing Benefits from Economies of Scale
Optikos buys a lot of lens elements and builds a lot of lenses. We use them in the engineering design and manufacturing work we do for clients—from prototype builds to long-run production volumes in the 10’s of thousands. Optikos production lenses. We’re a little different from other manufacturers—we don’t specialize in just infrared optics, or low-cost optics, or projection lenses, or any other specific market. We routinely purchase diamond turned plastic lenses, molded optics (glass and plastic), polished glass spheres and aspheres, doublets, triplets, cylinders, domes, IR lenses, UV optics, and so on. I’ve been tracking pricing from our quotes for a while now, and, while we won’t share all the details, I can share an overarching plot of lens...
Optical design optimization for glass equivalency to reduce supply chain burden
Lens manufacturing is dependent on the supply of optical-grade glasses, and with supply chain issues, glass selection can often make or break project timelines and cost. Experienced lens designers know the importance of glass selection and often need to consider glass availability early in the design process. Restricting the design space to specific glass manufacturers may potentially (a) inflate material costs by missing lower cost vendors, (b) increase build lead times due to availability of specific glasses, or (c) introduce avoidable stress onto your organization’s supply chain team! As an example, two visible spectrum microscope objectives were designed with a numerical aperture of 0.5 and a focal length of 5 millimeters (Figure 1). Both designs are diffraction-limited across the entire...
