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Online Lens/Optics Simulator
- mastax 4y agoThis is awesome! I spent a lot of time looking for a tool just like this and didn't find it. I've designed some simple-ish optical systems and I've been really frustrated by having trouble visualizing how different elements of the system will affect the light (especially moving parts). Also frustrating to have to calculate positions manually, etc. All the tools I could find were high-end quantum-optical simulators that cost more than my salary.
- mastax 4y agoIt looks like it doesn't support mirrors or things like right angle prisms. Mostly targeting camera lenses, it seems. Not super useful to me at the moment. I'll be watching with interest.
- txg 4y agoHave you got any recommendations for open-source, or free, optics design software?
- mastax 4y agoNo, I never found anything satisfactory. I ended up using SOLIDWORKS with some 3D sketch lines and reflection constraints to approximate it.
- aj7 4y agoI have done this myself, and I have a lot of experience in optics. I have also written a ray tracing program in Excel, which was able to reproduce aberration diagrams. By doing this first, I could use “professional” tools. Solidworks is excellent for reflective optics, and for prismatic, mainly planar systems. You can simulate Snell’s law either with an equation, or a simple construction using line segments of unit length, and of length equal to the refractive index of the surrounding medium. If you have nothing else, but you understand optics, you might get by with Solidworks. And there are commercial optics addins that have been written using the SolidWorks API.
- qwezxcrty 4y agoNo. There just isn't. It's a shame there are so many wheels for artistic rendering ray tracing with amazing performance, but simply no one bothered to invert camera as sources and objects as detectors, add more geometry and a tiny bit more of physics, and make a opensource non-sequential ray tracing engine suitable for optics design. Commercial tools like Zemax cost a leg (> $13k, and they were changing to subscriptions even before being bought by ANSYS) and have a rather steep learning curve. There are newcomers like COMSOL offering a ray tracing toolbox, haven't tried but they are offering generous free trials and the price seems to be more reasonable. Edit: maybe the abadonware Beam4 mentioned by another post worth trying.
- joshvm 4y agoYou can use some software for free with limitations eg OSLO https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download https://lambdares.com/oslo-edu-download FRED also has a demo mode https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ https://photonengr.com/fred-software/demo-request/ That might be enough for simple designs. Beam Four is also decent and allows you to use most common surface types including gratings. I'm interested in Optica (for Mathematica) but I don't know anyone that's used it.
- euoia 4y agoWhat sort of thing have you designed? I’m curious what the real world uses are for these sorts of tools.
- _flux 4y agoSo I'm quite uninformed on the topic, but why can't modern path tracing raytracers do this? They don't help with calculating positions, though, but might they still be suitable for checking the results?
- zokier 4y agoYou might be interested in reading https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/ https://benedikt-bitterli.me/tantalum/
- RobotToaster 4y agoInteresting, does it have a solver? Shame it isn't open source, something like this that could be iterated on would be huge.
- analognoise 4y agoBeam4 is available as fully open source optics software: https://www.stellarsoftware.com/ https://www.stellarsoftware.com/
- RobotToaster 4y agoWow, the interface looks like it's from the 80's
- myself248 4y agoWait until you see EZNEC for antenna simulation... At least it has a GUI, the original NEC was punchcards!
- cycomanic 4y agoWait until you see Zeemax a $4000 a year Software (last i recall) which is one of the 2 or 3 main players in this field. The interface was absolutely atrocious when I had to use it 8 years ago or so.
- twic 4y agoAlmost all of the camera lenses have moving parts, for focusing and possibly zooming. Is there any way to reproduce that movement in this tool?
- formerly_proven 4y agoDoesn't seem like it, though Bill Claff's tool, the lens database of which is used here, can: https://www.photonstophotos.net/GeneralTopics/Lenses/OpticalBench/OpticalBench.htm https://www.photonstophotos.net/GeneralTopics/Lenses/Optical...
- aj7 4y agoOf course. Change the spacing.
- iamthepieman 4y agoGot so excited when I saw this as I was recently trying to design a simple optics setup for focusing an infared light source into a collimated beam. Unfortunately the components seem very limited and there's no option to create your own custom ones by inputting surface, refractive and reflective characteristics and geometry.
- eckza 4y ago... I got excited when I saw this because I thought it might be an interactive tutorial about lenses and optics in Haskell.
- smartscience 4y ago+1 for also looking for a tool like this (online or otherwise) before, and being disappointed with what I found previously. Two projects immediately spring to mind: firstly, we have a theodolite to align some lab equipment, which I'd like to add a live digital camera to, and secondly we're designing a material heating system based on halogen tubes, for which we need to optimise the shapes of reflectors around the bulbs, subject to some geometry constraints. I'd not seen the sharedigm.com platform before either, possibly itself also interesting for other things.
- aj7 4y agoThe first task could be done with a tool like this, but it is not a project for beginners. The second requires a different tool, a non-sequential ray tracer. See https://community.zemax.com/got-a-question-7/sequential-vs-non-sequential-mode-656 https://community.zemax.com/got-a-question-7/sequential-vs-n...
- dekhn 4y agoThe other good, free simulator I've used is https://phydemo.app/ray-optics/ https://phydemo.app/ray-optics/ although I've struggled to get it to do anything real because it doesn't seem to allow you to set the focal length of lenses except by editing their sizes/shapes. I like to crank the # of rays way, way up and then sort of move lenses around to visualize somethign I'm working on the optical table.
- aj7 4y agoMany comments below seem to be from persons “interested” in optics, but who cannot design simple optical systems using first order optics, and who have never set up simple ray tracing with basic components or 2 x 2 matrices. Just as in electronic design with SPICE, in sizing components and choosing materials using FEA, or in fluency with ONE computer language, advanced tools are useless if you haven’t put in the basic study in the field, and have never used these components in the lab. No program can turn you into a practitioner by itself.
- world2vec 4y agoCould a complete amateur learn how to make a cheap DIY telescope lens in their own garage?
- jiggawatts 4y agoYes! While I haven’t done so myself, I looked into home-made telescopes as a way of getting much larger apertures on a budget. There is a whole group of hobbyists making primary mirrors up 80cm diameter for an order of magnitude lower cost than any off-the-shelf telescope with the same dimensions. Of course this takes hundreds of hours of work (fun!) and weeks of waiting while the glass is sent off to be mirror coated.
- analog31 4y agoDefinitely. People have made DIY scopes for at least a century. There's still a lot of old literature around. Among optical systems, a basic telescope is one of the least complex.
- mastax 4y agoCheck out Huygens Optics on YouTube. Lots of practical advise and tutorials.
- aj7 4y agoYes there are many books. It’s the motivation.
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- divan 4y agoSo I need to find a way to draw a light circle (1.5-2m in diameter) on the floor. Not filled circle, but the circular line filled with light. Ideally by the small "gadget" that can be placed on the floor. I first explored lasers solution, but seems like all options are just too big, complicated, expensive and regulated(only 5mW lasers can be used around people). Then started looking into options of using cheap light torches with some custom mirrors. And that's where I discovered that software for simulating light, mirrors and lenses starts from 5000$ per license. Some tools posted here (including OP link) are interesting, but still I have no idea if it's even possible to do what I'm trying to do. One close reference I found in this fantastic video on designing custom mirrors: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzemhuI1knQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzemhuI1knQ Author also discovered the crazy prices of optics software and went with Blender + LuxRender. If anyone have suggestions on how to find the solution for what I need, I'd appreciate that.
- mastax 4y agoI'd bet there's a professional lighting product that'll do that. Something like the lights they use to project arrows on the floor at IKEA. I don't know enough about that domain to know what they're called, sorry.
- divan 4y agoThere are, but they don't have constraints of being small, mobile and staying on the floor. Here is one remotely similar stuff, but it's too bulky and more complex (I need static ring basically and gadget that can fit the backpack) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXl3F5AoeQU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xXl3F5AoeQU
- handedness 4y agoWhat you want is a stage/DJ light which takes gobos, and the right gobo. For example: https://www.fullcompass.com/prod/212208-rosco-81115-glass-gobo-circle-outline https://www.fullcompass.com/prod/212208-rosco-81115-glass-go... The light wouldn't be on the ground but above it, projecting down. Edit: I should add, the gobo would need to be glass, as metal ones would have to interrupt the ring to support it. If the one linked above doesn't work for you, this place looks like it could custom make one to your spec and has a number of supported lamps under the "Gobo Size" drop-down. Explain what you need and they look like they can help you figure it out. You may also be able find a good deal on lighting in one of the usual marketplaces, but just confirm the fit with the gobo maker so you know what you're looking for.
- geenew 4y agoIs there a consensus on the standard optics 101 textbook?
- analog31 4y agoThe one I've mostly heard about is Hecht.
- signaru 4y agoThe optics chapter(s) within a general physics textbook would usually be a good place to begin without diving too much. My univ used Tipler, but other Univ Physics books would likely just be equally good. Then after that, as already answered, Hecht to go further while still being within a "101" level.
- opticsthrowaway 4y agoI used OpticSim.jl [1] in the past and it does the job. The documentation is far from perfect, but it's really capable. I managed to reproduce subtle distortions observed with Zemax in hyperspectral imagers. There is also a python ray tracer that I didn't have a chance to try, but it seems that the development has stopped [2]. [1] https://github.com/brianguenter/OpticSim.jl https://github.com/brianguenter/OpticSim.jl [2] https://github.com/quartiq/rayopt https://github.com/quartiq/rayopt
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