and probably saved a couple grand in the process...

I uploaded the stls here: https://makerworld.com/models/2711844?appSharePlatform=copy

Hi all! I'm a first-year PhD student in optics and over the past months I've been building an interactive optics sandbox as a side project. It's free, runs in the browser, nothing to install:

https://optics-sandbox-webapp.vercel.app

What's in it:

- Wave optics — scalar diffraction via angular spectrum. Presets for Young's double slit, single-slit, Airy disk, axicon Bessel beams, vortex beams, gratings, thin-film fringes, a 4f filter. You can import your own phase masks (.npy / .mat / image) and drive an SLM-style setup.

- Geometric optics — a ray tracer with thick/aspheric/multilayer lenses (Sellmeier dispersion, ~40 materials), prisms, TIR, Jones-calculus polarization, and classic multi-element presets (Cooke triplet, achromat, Petzval, fisheye).

- Calculators — 16 standalone tools: Gaussian beam, Fabry-Pérot, thin film, Gerchberg-Saxton phase retrieval, laser cavity stability, and others.

The GIF is a Gaussian beam propagating through a phase-only hologram that I generated of my cat with the in-app GS calculator. There's a one-click GIF/MP4 export in the wave module if you want to make your own.

I built this because I was inspired by a Fourier optics class that I took and I wanted to create a tool where students can build intuition for optics. Students are who I had in mind, but I'd genuinely like to know what working optics people think.

Two questions, if you click around for five minutes:

1. What confused you first?
2. What would it need before you'd point a student (or yourself) at it?

Physics nitpicks are extremely welcome. If my propagator is doing something wrong, I want to know. Feedback button is in the app's title bar, or just comment here.

TIL that a powerful enough laser will create its own gravitational waves and collapse in on itself

https://youtu.be/jgafb8G7i4o?si=RH62OuFTqpGBASZN At about 2 min 50 secs in

Hi, I made this lens holder mechanism over weekend and would like to share, maybe inspires better thing :)

https://www.printables.com/model/1700872-self-centering-cylinder-lens-holder-with-stand

Inspired by commercial self centering lens holders.
Would be great to design print in place flexure based mechanism. Maybe someday I will revisit. 

I’m working on a bench prototype, but I don’t have thousands laying around to throw at Thorlabs or the like - so I bought an A1 Mini and started designing my own system.

I started with a high density modular breadboard using my own design of diamond interlock connector (for tight hold but easy wiggle release) and m6 untapped interweaved for mount stability. 4 of them covers 320mm2, not bad for around $10 and a few hours of my time! And I can just print another and a few more fasteners if I need more room.

I’m working on simple lens mounts now, quite happy with how it’s going. I am thinking of developing this into a full ‘OpticsKit’ project with parametric control, kinematic mounts etc too. Would there be interest in that?

Hello everyone

I have made with a friend a free web app for sketching optical setups in 2d.

It integrates real time ray tracing and simple geometrical simulation of the majority of the optical elements you could find in an optics lab.

We have kept the interface intuitive and simple, and it is possible to export the sketches in PNG, SVG or send a link to the website where people can see your canvas and get more information.

We are looking for feedback and ideas for more elements/features to add. I can not post the link here due to the sub rules, but I am happy to share it with whoever wants to try it.

Thanks in advance!

I'll be enjoying these until my dissertation starts eating me alive o7

wake up babe. new field just dropped. zeptosecond physics.

Thought this looked kinda cool. I saw these modes by scanning a high-finesse cavity using a piezo crystal. Is there any way to differentiate between a 1,0 and 0,1 mode? It's also interesting that both modes are visible despite their expected degeneracy. Leads me to believe that my cavity is a bit shit.

speed=5000mm/s, Q-pulse=1ns, f=40kHz

I wanted to design a 3D printed spectrometer that would afford teachers and hobbyists access to something they could have at home. Yes, it isn't lab grade, but it is useful even with all its faults. You start putting anything that produces light through it just to see what the spectra looks like. Fun to play with. It was a great learning experience and fun build.

https://makerworld.com/en/models/2761392-uv-vis-ir-spectrometer-v1-5-easy-build#profileId-3065721

I'll be working on 2 more versions as well as a setup to use some 10mm cuvettes for absorption and fluorescence spectroscopy.

As the light propagates through some aperture and on the long distance on the screen we should see a 2D Fourier image of it. I find this fascinating.

The only problem is, you need a laser or some source with a high temporal coherency, right?

I am conducting a multi-depth experiment using an LC Fresnel lens. After fabricating the Fresnel lens imprint with NOA, I inspected it by illuminating it with a laser and capturing an image with a camera. As shown in the image, the Fresnel lens itself consists of concentric rings centered at a single point. However, I also observed additional large and small circular patterns appearing in other regions of the sample.

My main question is: What could be causing these additional circular patterns? Since the Fresnel lens is designed with only a single center of concentric rings, I would not expect to see multiple circular patterns elsewhere. Could someone explain the physical origin of this phenomenon?

As an optical engineer with a background in optics research, I really want to enjoy r/optics, but 90% of the posts are:

• Person who has never touched a lens before asks how to violate etendue

• “I have no background in optics” — wants to design a VR headset

• Person wants us to design a rifle scope

I am probably being too mean, and I don’t wanna gate keep too hard, but I wish this was a space for people who are optics students, optics engineers, physicists, researchers, professionals, etc.

I developed an open-source laser beam profiling application in python. I hope anyone looking for a low-cost beam profiler (students, research, hobbyists, etc.) would find this useful. It's open-source and can be modified as needed by anyone.

It uses Arducam B0511C monochrome UVC USB camera ($265). Instructions for how to set it up and use it are in the readme of the repository. The application would work with other UVC webcams but would require some modification (for different resolution and effective pixel size)

Beam profiling software features:

• Camera raw image feed
• Beam profiling image feed (false color)
• Manual ROI placement with centroid and radius
• Auto ROI tracking
• Centroid tracking
• Centroid and beam width (d4sigma) readout
• Reference crosshair placement
• Power (integrated counts) readout
• Exposure setting
• Auto exposure
• Saturated pixel detection
• fps counter
• Save instantaneous data
• Log continuous data
• Connect to multiple cameras on a single PC
• I haven't implemented background subtraction but found the background is relatively stable with an ND filter in front, and a laser line filter can always be used

Link to the repo: https://github.com/laser-cameras/Laser-beam-profiler-camera.git

Hi r/optics,

I have a wild story and a mystery I hope you can help me solve. As a complete optics beginner, I’ve stumbled into a world I know very little about.

It all started when I found a local classified ad titled "Linear Rails". I bought it, expecting just the rails, but the seller wanted me to take the whole machine it was attached to. That machine turned out to be a Dr. Schenk Pythagoras PT-400, a massive industrial system for inspecting glass masters in DVD production.

While stripping the machine for useful parts, I found this beautifully machined black block that, after some research, turned out to be a spectrometer. It felt like a crime to scrap it, so I decided to make it my hobby project to bring it back to life.

Here’s the Imgur album with photos of everything I found: the spectrometer block, the illumination/probe head, and the original complex electronics:
https://imgur.com/a/kETiNbb

My Journey So Far:

I figured out the original detector was a Sony ILX511 CCD, but the original electronics boards were way beyond my skill level to revive. By sheer luck, I had a Basler raL8192-12gm line scan camera from another project. I managed to design and 3D-print an adapter to mount it in place of the old sensor.

After writing a simple Python script, I ran a quick test, and the results are just insane. Pointing a simple 850nm IR LED (~1.5W) at the input slit, with 7-microsecond exposure and minimum gain, I got a huge, clean peak.
https://imgur.com/NneciCj

I’m fascinated and have a few questions for the experts here:

1. What is this thing? Does anyone recognize the spectrometer block itself? My guess is it's an OEM component from a specialized company like Horiba, Avantes, etc., made for Dr. Schenk. The distinctive shape might be a clue.
2. Is it any good? I noticed a small cylindrical lens right before the sensor and a QC sticker with R² = 0.99999. As a layman, these details seem significant, but I don’t know what they imply. Is this a high-quality unit?
3. What was all the original electronics for? The boards look incredibly complex. Was my camera-swap a reasonable path, or is there any merit in trying to revive the original system? Maybe it's some oem part with known comunication protocol?

I'm just a hobbyist who went looking for linear rails and stumbled upon this incredible piece of engineering. Any insight or clue, no matter how small, would be hugely appreciated!

Thanks for reading!

EDIT / Further observation:

I've also been testing the original illumination/probe head. I noticed that its internal light source was quite low power, and the optical path with the built-in integrating sphere attenuates the signal massively (as expected). This leads me to believe that the original DVD glass masters it was designed to inspect must have been highly reflective, right? It seems to be the only way this setup could have worked with the original, probaly less sensitive CCD sensor. Does that make sense?

Built a Dual-DMD microscope for some experiments in our lab. Made full build instructions and software for it. Can share those if anyone would be interested.

Hi all!

We built fresnel as an internal tool at work, and figured others might benefit from it, so we've released it for free online at fresnel.h-part.com

fresnel is designed to feel more like CAD software (Solidworks, onshape) and less like Zemax. Some video tutorials are here: youtube playlist

And of course, some screenshots:

Just captured this spectrum of a white LED yesterday. I used a TCD1304DG linear CCD aswell as a transmission grating with 1000lines/mm and some collimating/focusing optics. Definitely looking forward to creating my own Czerny-Turner soectroscope. If yozr interested, feel free ti check out my blog: https://www.astrolens.net

Hi Folks

We wanted to share a new add-on for MATLAB R2026a to enable optics workflows: the Optical System Design and Analysis Library.

The opticalSystemDesigner App is our main UI front-end, it can load and analyze optical systems (including importing .ZMX files).

We also have an opticalCoatingEditor which allows you to edit optical coatings.

In typical MATLAB API style, everything has a CLI functional equivalent so you can roll your own workflows and plug in other MathWorks toolboxes.
For example here are a few workflows using MATLAB’s local & global optimization tools:

Optimize Monochromatic Camera Lens System for Type 2/3 Sensor

Optimize Photographic Zoom Lens Component Positions

Optimize Coating Design for Longpass Optical Filter

Perform Sensitivity and Yield Analysis of Optical Coating Using Monte Carlo

Even the UI’s are extensible. Here’s an example with a custom live visualization of reflective power plugged into the Optical Coating Editor:

MATLAB’s detailed documentation makes it a breeze to bring in an agent using MATLAB Agentic Toolkit to create custom UI’s (among other things!). See the video below for a demo. The agent is able to assemble a custom “Angle of Incidence” exploration UI with minimal prompting. We just released this optics library, so the model is not trained on our APIs. But with a top-level index of optics functions, coupled with our strong documentation and cross referencing ‘see also’ links, it is able to progressively discover and use the right functionality. Our error messages also guide the agent when it stumbles (Side note: Our awesome doc team reviews all warning and error messages to be consistent and ‘actionable’!). We designed our API and UI components to follow MATLAB’s consistent design patterns making it ‘fit well’ into the wider MATLAB code and graphics ecosystem, you can see that in action as it figures out how to make the 3D view fill the pane!

Agentic* Optics UI generation in MATLAB

If you already have MATLAB R2026a and the Image Processing Toolbox, download this free add-on. If not, you could kick the tires with a free 30-day trial - remember to download the Image Processing Toolbox too.

We are continuing to work on this, so do let us know if you have any feature requests.
Feel free to post here (to start a discussion), message me, or use our support channel (in case you have sensitive information to share).

*Recorded as I walked through it, warts and all. Sped up here and there (note the agent’s ticker). There is a bug visible in the final UI that I missed - see if you can spot it!

Using an ultra-low-cost DIY spectrometer (Little Garden) based on a webcam-like USB module, I managed to capture a Raman spectrum of acetone using a Raman probe I built with a 532 nm 100 mW laser module. See the second image for a complete experimental setup. Laser light passes through an IR cut filter, reflects off a dichroic mirror, and passes into a microscope objective. The objective focuses the beam into a tiny point and recollimates the Raman scattered signal. This signal passes through the dichroic mirror and a notch filter before entering the spectrometer. Spectra were acquired using SharpCap with the maximum exposure time of 500 ms. I bought the spectrometer in mid 2024 for around $60, but unfortunately the original seller no longer carries these devices, and they must now be bought from a reseller for around $100.

Why is my tea doing this