In the next couple of articles, we will talk about the different instrumentation used by ophthalmologists and optometrists. As you can imagine, there are many restrictions when designing an optical instrument that will be used in a patient. It matters whether the...
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Scan Mirrors In Industrial Welding
by Victor Argueta | Mar 2, 2022 | FAQ, Optical Components, Victor Argueta
This is our last entry on our scanning mirrors series. In this article, we will talk about the use of scanning mirrors when working with welding environments. As you can imagine, not only do the optical requirements differ when compared to those of a scanning...
Steering Mirrors In LIDAR Systems
by Victor Argueta | Feb 15, 2022 | FAQ, lens design consulting, Optical Components, optical engineering, Victor Argueta
This is our third installment of a four-series blogs about steering mirrors. We have talked previously about steering mirrors in laser markings and steering mirrors in OCT systems. This week, we will talk about the steering mirror requirements for those in LIDAR...
Steering Mirrors in OCT
by Victor Argueta | Jan 27, 2022 | Optical Components, opto-mechanical design, scanners
This week, we will continue our discussion of fast steering mirrors. If you missed our last article, go ahead and read about steering mirrors for laser marking. Here, we will discuss the design requirements for steering mirrors in Optical Coherence Tomography (OCT)....
Steering Mirrors in Laser Marking
by Victor Argueta | Jan 13, 2022 | scanners
In the next couple of weeks, we will be talking about the different design requirements and restrictions when working with steering mirrors, also known as scanning mirrors. The objective is to show you that different applications require different solutions, and that...
Understanding objective lenses
by Victor Argueta | Dec 13, 2021 | FAQ, lens design, Optical Components, optical design, optical engineering
Introduction In previous entries, we have talked about the design of scanning microscopes, infinity corrected microscopes, confocal microscope design, and Koehler illumination systems-a common illumination system in microscopes. The most essential microscope element...
Rigid Endoscope Design
by Victor Argueta | Dec 2, 2021 | FAQ, optical design, optical engineering, Victor Argueta
Endoscopes are medical devices designed to collect the smallest images from inside the human body. Endoscopes can be divided into two categories: rigid endoscopes, in which relay lenses are stacked together generally creating a high-quality image, and flexible...
Cardinal Points
by Victor Argueta | Nov 29, 2021 | FAQ, optical design, optics, Victor Argueta
When I was a young undergrad engineering student, I always found optics to be a very confusing subject. It was not only the equations, but what it looked like hundreds of different definitions involved in even the simplest of optical systems. Some concepts, like...
Powell Lens Design
by Victor Argueta | Nov 11, 2021 | FAQ, lens design, machine vision, optical design
Previous posts have reviewed different techniques for beam homogenization as well as the difference between spot size and beam angle. This post will review a method for beam shaping using Powell Lenses. Powell lenses are lenses that create a straight laser line by...
Calcium Fluoride Glass: An Overview
by Victor Argueta | Oct 28, 2021 | FAQ, lens design consulting, OFH, Optical Components
The choice of glass is a fundamental part in the optical design process. This is especially true for IR and thermal optics materials. In this article, we will review Calcium Fluoride (CaF2), an interesting glass that has a wide range of applications. Before we start,...
Beam Splitters: Explained
by Victor Argueta | Oct 13, 2021 | FAQ, Optical Components
Beam splitters are a fundamental element in optical systems. Beam splitters are, in essence, optical components used to divide a single light source (usually a laser) into two separate beams. The more common kind of beam splitters (the kind that you can find in most...
Bidirectional Scattering Distribution Function
by John | Oct 7, 2021 | Uncategorized
As optical engineers, we are in charge of more than just the design and implementation of optical systems for specific applications: we often need to evaluate optical systems’ performance or to assess the quality of optical components. To do these assessments, we...
Conoscopic Lens Design
by Victor Argueta | Sep 16, 2021 | illumination, illumination lens design, lens design
A conoscopic lens is an instrument that can be used to measure the angular distribution of a light source. Its use is quite different from a lens, as in photography. An image created by a conoscopic lens resembles that of a fisheye lens. That is a...
Koehler Illumination
by Victor Argueta | Sep 7, 2021 | FAQ, lens design consulting
When designing any optical system, an optical engineer needs to consider how illumination will be used: specifically, how the illumination could affect the way the image is created. If not carefully designed, some illumination systems may create a kind of...
Tessar Lens Design
by Victor Argueta | Aug 17, 2021 | FAQ, lens design, optical design
Among the many lens design configurations, one of the most common lens optical layouts is the Tessar Lens. This layout was created by Paul Rudolph in 1902 for photographic lenses. In the golden age of film photography, the...
M squared and designing laser beam optics
by Victor Argueta | Aug 9, 2021 | FAQ, optical design
There are different ways to calculate the quality of a laser beam. In general, we want our laser beam to be as close to a theoretical Gaussian Beam as possible. The question then is how do we measure the profile of our beam and how do we compare it against our ideal...
Confocal Microscope Design: Explained
by Victor Argueta | Jun 23, 2021 | 3D, FAQ, optical design
Confocal microscopy is a very popular technique for high-quality images. It is useful when working with tissue or bio-samples due to the relatively simple sample preparation. While in a traditional microscope we have a wide field where most of the elements at the...
Projection Lens Design
by Victor Argueta | Jun 23, 2021 | illumination lens design, lens design, optical design, Zemax
Projection systems are one of the most common consumer optical devices (probably second to photographic systems). They allow us to view images on a screen (usually) by magnifying and projecting them at distances from a few centimeters to several meters away...
Fisheye Lens Design
by Victor Argueta | Jun 11, 2021 | FAQ, illumination, lens design consulting, optical design
Anyone who has peaked through a hotel room peephole has used a fish eye lens. Usually, the fish eye lens has a very short focal length (less than 15mm for a 35mm-size image sensor), but a large field of view (FOV). The latter can be as large as...
Parabolic Mirror Design
by Victor Argueta | Jun 11, 2021 | FAQ, optical design, optical engineering, optics definitions
Parabolic mirrors are optical systems that are used to collect or distribute energy. They have a wide range of applications from solar collectors for water heating systems to microscopes and telescopes, and everyday flashlights. The most common way ...
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