Ross Optical Blog: The Latest News & Research

The following is shared Shared with permission of David Aikens, Savvy Optics:

There are some critical steps needed in order to create an effective optical design. Whether a basic design or complex, it is important to find a supplier that can produce your product in a quick, cost-effective way. Ross Optical is a reliable partner known to improve time to market and optimize your product performance.

Nestor Sigala joined Ross Optical earlier this year to help with Optomechanical Design and Sales. We sat down with Nestor to discover more about his background and contributions to Ross Optical.

When creating an optical system, there are many challenges an engineer faces when choosing how to design a lens. Choosing the correct lens without the right tools can prove to be very difficult and costly. Zemax, a ray-tracing optical design software program, provides designs and analyses for imaging and illumination systems. This allows for the user to view the way different lenses work while providing analysis diagrams documenting a variety of data sets. Zemax is a great tool to improve performance, shorten time to market, and reduce production costs.

This article is the last of our three-part series on optical design secrets. In previous blogs we explained some important aspects of optical manufacturing, and we offered advice on how to protect your production schedule by using reliable optics sourcing to defend your optics supply chain. This final article provides some best practices to follow when using optical design software. There are too many programs and applications for us to give software-specific advice, but our optical design expertise enables us to provide some important principles that apply whenever you use software to optimize the performance of an optical system design .

A previous article explored applications of cylinder lenses. In those examples, the lenses were only curved on one side—the other side was flat (i.e. "plano-"). Cylinder lenses can be curved on both sides, though, creating a "rod lens." Rod lenses are unique in that they can be used either side-on or end-on depending upon the application. Here are three examples of their versatility.

This article is the first of a three-part series on aspects of design that are sometimes overlooked in optics courses. Optical design is often as much art as science. However, it is not magic! Like any art or science, skill in the trade comes only with experience and practice. That said, you can save time by learning from the experience of others.

The optical assembly process is often treated as an afterthought of the design process; however, once a product has gone into production, assembly becomes a dominant cost. Designing for ease of assembly becomes a considerable cost-saver in the long run. Below we offer three important points to consider as you develop a product.

In the design of any optical system, managing cost versus performance is always a challenge. When faced with this challenge, it is important to realize that properly tolerancing the design is every bit as important as the design itself.

At Ross Optical, we take pride in our reputation for outstanding customer support. A big reason for our customers' satisfaction is how we handle customers before they are our customers. Many optical suppliers require contracts and commitments before they will help a customer with design issues. At Ross, we think that's backward. Getting to the best design can take some time, and we prefer to help our customers overcome those design hurdles before committing to an order. The design collaboration process varies from customer to customer, but it typically goes something like this: