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Whether we are designing a Type III streetlight, light pipe, headlamp, wall wash, or an aviation light, we start by asking for: · LED part number · Required beam pattern · Mechanical space for the new optic. That's it. Those questions are the ones that determine, ‘Is the design possible?’, ‘What efficiency is possible?’ and ‘How long will it take?’ Everything else is secondary; production and prototyping methods, material selection, design type (lens, TIR, reflector). We have delivered hundreds of unique illumination designs, but every project started with those same 3 questions.

What kind of projects does OFH work on? Even after twenty years, it's still tough to give a quick answer! Our work has covered everything from optics used inside a Barbie Doll, to objective lenses for Argonne National Labs. And we are always learning about new applications and ways to leverage our core knowledge - photonics and optics to help others. Chris Lee of Aqua Real time reached out to us in late 2018, with some research papers on the detection of chlorophyll-a and phycocyanin in waterbodies. Their business concept was to disrupt the incumbent, expensive algae detection systems with a new model. By using lower cost, IoT floating buoys to collect real time water conditions and uploading the data to a cloud, Aqua Real Time's Algae Tracker saves water resource engineers time and money and provides fast diagnostics of potential problems. In the years since then, we worked with Chris and Aqua Real Time to develop new concepts of detection systems based on spectroscopy, then design and build protypes to demonstrate the technology and attract investors and now we support their ongoing production of key optical components. If you see algae blooms in a body of water near you, remember the creative companies using optical devices to manage and address that problem. And if you happen to know water body managers send them to the Algae Tracker website.

Coatings, tolerances, material melt parameters, every detail matters for when designing and producing a lens element. Over specify your design and the lens will cost a fortune, under specify and it will fail. And that's just for the elements, factor in assembly tolerances for air gap, tilt and centration, plus considerations for how those might change at different temperatures and even a 'simple' lens can be complex. Finding the right balance of trade-offs between performance and cost is hard. But these are the issues optical engineers and opto- mechanical engineers spend their careers managing. Have questions about your system? We can help.

If your optical engineer tells you: "The Zemax ray tracing says the system will work great!" and also "Zemax simulations says it will be terrible." You might think you need to find a new engineer... But you might actually have found one doing a thorough job. Here's why: ZEMAX allows for two main modes of simulation: sequential and non-sequential. A sequential model follows the optical path of light as it goes from one surface to the next. It's used for designing imaging lenses from photographic to microscope lenses, telescopes, and relay lenses. Sequential modelling is computationally fast and great to define tolerances and aberrations. A non-sequential model on the other hand accounts for the fact that the path that each individual ray follows can be completely different from its neighbor. In reality, light might miss a lens element or travel multiple times through a system as it bounces off mirrors or mechanical parts. In the image of an ophthalmoscope seen below, light moves from an LED (on the bottom) through a pair of condensing lens and then light is reflected by a folding mirror. The rays of light are then directed by an objective lens back to the eye. This light illuminates the retina and light from the retina bounces back through the same path, light goes through an aperture in the folding mirror and focuses on a camera sensor. Both ray tracing modes might have been used for the design of this system, but if light scattering was creating hot spots and light flares on the image sensor, only the non-sequential model would have indicated those problems.