The Optics Of Rainbows
By Gustav Strömqvist | Rainbows are a beautiful physical phenomenon, forming as the result of how the sunlight refracts and reflects inside droplets of water before reaching your eyes. In the visible range, water has a refractive index of n ≈ 1.33 or n ≈ 4/3, with a difference of around 0.0013, or 1%, between violet (400
Lightguides – shape and performance – part 2
By Billy Kaldvee | In the last post we recommended to keep the distance between the LED and the light guide ten times smaller than the light guide diameter. To demonstrate why this is recommended for a high efficiency system, we once again do simulations on the 3 mm diameter circular light guide with the […]
Lightguides – shape and performance – part 1
By Billy Kaldvee | Have you ever done a mechanical design of a light guide without doing any optical simulations and wondered why the result looked as something you did not expect? In two posts we go through some of the basic aspects of light guide geometries and how they influence the perceived output. In […]
Etendue and Optical Invariants
By Olov von Hofsten and Simon Olin | “The possibilities of optics are endless” – you may have heard things like this and it sounds great and wonderful. Unfortunately it is not true – you have been told a lie. The possibilities of optics are NOT endless. In fact, it is very important to know […]
The Perfect LiDAR – does it exist?
By Olov von Hofsten | As a consultant, I have often been approached by unrealistic requirements from customers, and the LiDAR business is particularly prone to this. Perhaps because the technology is new. A customer often wants: If a customer was to write a specification for a camera system, this would not happen, as there […]
Simulating Luminance in Zemax
By Olov von Hofsten | Luminance is arguably the most important component to analyze when evaluating a lighting design since it answer the fundamental question, “What will it look like?”. In Zemax you get easily get the luminance for an entire surface, but not the local luminance or luminace maps. However, there are ways around [&h
7 Best Zemax Tricks and Tips
By Olov von Hofsten | At Eclipse we use Zemax a lot, everyday actually. But although we know the optics necessary to make optimal optical designs, knowing a software’s hidden shortcuts is not always the same. We recently had Alissa Wilcynski from Zemax give us a three-day course at our site in Stockholm. The course […]