Optical Design comes to the iPad!

Over the past 5 years, almost every project I’ve worked on has required some level of optic design. In many cases, simple designs suffice. For example, projecting an LED can be accomplished at a basic level with an aspheric condenser. But when designs require flat fields, especially corrective elements, or apochromatic performance, it’s time to leverage commercial tools like Zemax. Luckily, I have one of the best Zemax gurus on the planet on hand for such work. But there is a middle ground where I want to work on designs I’d call basic+. This is where there has never been a clear solution. In such cases, the best compromise is to buy experimental grade lenses, and test them empirically.

Obviously this presents 3 problems:

• shipping time + setup time = a long iterative design process.
• when issues are found, the only solution is to snag a few more lenses and test, vs.  modeling a solution.
• The end result is “good enough” , but it’s unknown as to where other improvements may be found.

So imagine my surprise when I found an app for ray tracing and modeling, in the App store! Too good to be true – has to be a joke, right? Nope – Check out this short example, showing the Nikon 105mm SLR lens.

[youtube width=”600″ height=”365″ video_id=”KPwETNTQfFI”]

You can read more about RayLab here – http://www.raymak.com/wp/  or can download it on the app store here.

The basic app is ~ $2.00. Adding all of the features will run just under $30. Considering that the cheapest alternative runs ~ $1500, this is an amazing deal. Anyway – I hope others find this as useful as I have!

Oh one more example – here’s the optical design for a Zeiss 40x objective! Cool huh?!?!

-Austin