I finally wrote up my results on producing lenses with 3D printers, which I’ve been working on since September, as a paper which I submitted to the Open Hardware Journal. It was published in their first issue (stand alone PDF of my paper) at the beginning of the month.
A number of people were excited by my paper, and I’ve had several email correspondences about it since publication. NBitWonder had a post about it.
It’s exciting to see such interest in my work.
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Tags: 3d printing, open hardware, optics
November 12, 2011 at 21:15 |
Awesome work! I had been wondering whether laser-cutting lenses would work, but I also expected the stepping effect to be too dramatic. Using foil wrappings makes a lot of sense, of course!
I wonder how well this would work if your positive is printed with 20 micron or less layer heights. And that doesn’t need to take very long either, when printed on an Ultimaker… (alright, shameless self promotion, but on-topic, I believe).
November 19, 2011 at 22:27 |
>Awesome work! I had been wondering whether laser-cutting lenses would work, but I also expected the stepping effect to be too dramatic
I’ve done some tests with laser-cut prisms. Very promising.
Lenses are a bit trickier since you you have very large discrete steps with height, but I’ve been thinking of doing two part fresnel lens assemblies…
> I wonder how well this would work if your positive is printed with 20 micron or less layer heights. And that doesn’t need to take very long either, when printed on an Ultimaker…
Only one way to find out
November 12, 2011 at 21:24 |
If you say 20 micron it will never make as much an impression as the picture of the patch of finger that you see holding a piece of a 3D print under a microscope:
http://davedurant.wordpress.com/2011/10/12/ultimaker-faq-but-what-about-the-quality-of-prints/
Anyway, cool to see that there’s now an open hardware magazine!