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.
Tags: 3d printing, open hardware, optics
Christopher Olah's Blog 
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!
March 3, 2012 at 20:29 |
Hey Chris, I saw an interesting talk recently on diffractive optics, I don’t know if you’ve looked at those but it’s pretty cool stuff, see:
http://spie.org/x8625.xml
Unfortunately, sounds like some of the holes need to be as small as 10 microns for visible wavelengths. Might be hard to laser-cut that…
Another fun property is that the chromatic aberrations are linear with wavelength so you get extreme dispersion.
March 16, 2012 at 04:05 |
That looks really cool, Xavier! Thanks for telling me!
(Sorry about the late response, didn’t get an email from wordpress for some reason…)
July 6, 2012 at 17:24 |
[…] for 3-D printing; he writes articles about how to print things you wouldn’t expect, like camera lenses or vacuum cleaners.In the San Francisco hostel, residents tend to be more diverse by age and […]
July 29, 2012 at 00:38 |
Luxexcel seems to have hit on a good solution for 3d printing optics. http://www.luxexcel.com/
August 16, 2012 at 05:12 |
Neat! Thanks for the link!
September 13, 2012 at 17:27 |
http://www.exxelens.com from Luxexcel in the Netherlands. They speak about a one-step-cad-to-optic process and no post processing necessary calling it printoptical technology.
September 20, 2012 at 18:27 |
Have you actually tried to make a mirror? I’d like to read more about your experiences.
September 20, 2012 at 20:53 |
I made a brief attempt before the lenses. If you skim through my SoOnCon 2011 talk slides, you can find some stuff on it.
October 6, 2012 at 12:08 |
post processing is not good for optics. better to print exactly the disired result directly from CAD file like http://www.luxexcel.com/en/technology/technology-movie.htm
December 10, 2012 at 15:19 |
Interesting tech that seems to be able to digitize the optics manufacturing. Interesting business story too at their website: http://www.luxexcel.com/company/the-luxexcel-story/
July 15, 2013 at 22:29 |
I have a pair of discontinued Oakley sunglasses that I wish I could find replacement lenses for. Would it be possible to 3D scan my existing lenses and then 3D print new ones?
July 16, 2013 at 01:34 |
Maybe? The tricky part will be getting the print to optical quality.
Also, it may not be sufficient to reproduce the geometry of your lens, since the material you make the new one out of may have a different index of refraction.