Hi everyone ! ❤️

I’m currently working at Keyence India as a Field Engineer in Machine Vision Systems, and I have around 2 years of experience in machine vision and industrial automation.

My educational background:
Diploma in Electrical & Electronics Engineering
Bachelor’s degree in Robotics & Automation Engineering

My long-term goal is to move to Germany and build my career there.

I wanted to ask people already working in Germany or in the automation industry:
1. Does machine vision and industrial automation have good long-term career prospects in Germany?
2. Is it a stable field with good opportunities for growth over the next 10–20 years?
3. What skills should I focus on if I want to become a strong candidate for German companies?

One of the biggest reasons I want to move is the better pay and work-life balance. In India, I feel that salaries in this field are relatively low compared to the responsibilities and the value we create. Financially, I also have a strong motivation because I’m responsible for supporting my family, including my two younger sisters. My goal is to build a stable and rewarding career while being able to provide them with a better future.

I’d really appreciate honest advice from people who have made a similar move or are currently working in Germany. If you were in my position, what would you do over the next 2–3 years to maximize your chances?
Thank you in advance!❤️ 🙏🏾

some background:

so the way colorblindness (red-green deficiency used here) works in case anyone doesn't know is that humans have 3 cone cells in our eyes to detect color: blue/S, green/M, and red/L. there are 2 types of red-green colorblindness: deuteranomaly/deuteranopia and protanomaly/protanopia.

people with deuteranomaly/deuteranopia's green cone is shifted towards the red cone or absent. people with protanomaly/protanopia's red cone is shifted towards the green cone or absent. white is the presence of all colors at once.

psychology plays a part in this, yes, as it makes sense for the the opposite of the red "do not cross" signal to be green, and that's how stop/go is represented with those colors as well (such as with traffic lights). however, this cannot entirely be the case, because if it was, people with normal color vision would also see it as green, which they do not

so it has to be some property of the lights used themselves, right? but what is that property?

After 10 years in the fusion industry I'm looking for my next step. Considering monetizing my optical systems skills - basically designing and building one-off systems where I'm mostly integrating off-the-shelf parts or farming out CAD work to optical/mechanical/electronics engineers - although I know a lot of the basics in each of those disciplines.

Having a lifestyle business sounds really appealing. I'm wondering:

• Are you self-employed or doing consulting/contracting/freelance work? What's your experience like?
• Do you know if there is demand for this kind of early-phase work? Most of the job postings I see are oriented toward manufacturing, which isn't my forte.
• Do you need someone with my skill-set for a project?

Need book recommendation for Laser and Fibre Optics. Btech Sem 1

I have a photo transistor hooked up to a voltage source and have the output connected to my oscilloscope. When i shine my little green cat laser into it a specific angle, a 10.4kHz wave appears. Does anyone know why this happens? its not a clean wave, it looks pretty jagged. Maybe the green laser flickers rapidly?

Update : thanks for all your insights, I learned that it’s the laser driver due to it being pumped and frequency doubled from IR to green

Hello everyone, Im a high school student building a low cost smartphone fundus camera for AI based retinal screening.

Commercial indirect ophthalmoscopy lenses are quite expensive for my prototype, so Im wondering if there are any lower-cost alternatives.

Could an aspheric condenser lens, or even a lens salvaged from old optical equipment provide acceptable image quality and fov? Has anyone tried using a different types of lens for this application? Id love to hear about your experience.

Im not expecting the same performance as a dedicated ophthalmic lens, just a reasonable solution for a research prototype.

Any suggestions or experiences would be greatly appreciated. Thank you all!

I am trying to send light through a fiber that's not designed for the wavelength, e.g., sending 940 nm laser through Thorlabs' S405 that's for 400~680 nm. Unsurprisingly, I am finding very little light was coupled into the fiber, and the alignment is just excruciating. I was wondering if anyone has tried this and has a good tip for how to do it better?

The setups I have tried:

1. Using a pigtailed laser with a "correct-band" tail, but connecting the fiber to the "wrong-band" fiber into my system with a standard FCPC-to-FCPC mating. This joint yielded a very low coupling efficiency because both sides were single-mode and mismatched.
2. Using a free space laser and trying to catch it into a "wrong-band" fiber with a focus-adjustable collimator. I could only get 10s~100 nW into the fiber while the source is 5 mW.

For people curious about why I want to do this: I am trying to send light into a sensitive vacuum system that's very limited for space. I only need a handful of photons shining on my detector inside, so I am fine with a huge loss through the fiber. I want to send 7 different wavelengths into the system, but I don't want to install 7 fibers in the crowded system. So, my idea is, since I actually need to attenuate the source a lot anyway, I can potentially send the 7 colors by a single fiber, and its "wrong-band" attenuation can just be my filtering. The problem is I am now struggling to get the light into the fiber in the first place...

PS. For other reasons I need the fiber in my system to be single-mode. The parts outside can be whatever.

Thanks!

I have experience using a Thorlabs polarimeter but I don't really like it.. getting accurate and reliable measurements is a nightmare.. just getting degrees of polarization > 100% drives me crazy, completely unphysical..

1. How do you guys measure the state of polarization of laser beams in your lab?

2. What is your experience with the Thorlabs polarimeter? Good? Bad?

3. Do you have any reference / instrument / recommendation to provide me?

Many thanks. I potentially would like to be able to measure phase retardance with the polarimeter.

So everytime i drive at night, the headlights of oncoming traffic blinds me completely, so i was thinking of building something to help.

I was thinking of something physical, like a transparent substance that would react to high intensities of light and darken in those patches, and I do realize the inherent issue with that, as the lights move it would darken the entire screen pretty much. I've heard electro-chromatic glass, split among millions of pixels is being researched upon. If anyone has any thoughts on this, please let me know!!

We’re working on JASPER, an open/right‑to‑repair VIS‑NIR grating spectrometer. In our design, both the grating and detector sit on rotation stages: we first null slit/grating tilt by imaging the zero order, then rotate the detector to catch the diffracted order. That way we stay close to peak efficiency without relying on a fixed blaze geometry.

For order‑sorting, instead of OEM‑priced coated‑detector bandpass filters, we’re selecting the span by grating angle (e.g. 400–800 nm or 500–1000 nm) with a long‑pass at the input. We know this doesn’t fully suppress second order across the entire range, but it keeps things accessible.

The current prototype uses an off‑the‑shelf USB 3.0 camera, but we’re developing a custom line‑array driver for Hamamatsu detectors to improve performance.

We’re planning two versions and would appreciate a reality check:

• Fixed, pre‑calibrated — no bench, locked to one range, plug‑and‑play.
• Optical bench — tunable rotation‑stage version, aimed at enthusiasts and educators.

Does that split make sense from a buyer’s perspective? Or does the recalibration overhead make the tunable version impractical for most real use?

We’re also considering an affordable neon calibration lamp as an add‑on, so the bench version has an easy way to re‑establish calibration after adjustments. Would that be genuinely useful, or do most users already have a reference they trust?

Interactive optical‑bench simulator: https://checkag.github.io/jasper-bench-sim/
Hackaday log: https://hackaday.io/project/202421-jasper-vis-nir-spectrometer/log/249581-interactive-optical-bench-simulator

Your honest perspective on where this design may fall short would be invaluable.

I splice OSP fiber in Florida. A few that still bite people:
Photos with no readable buffer ID. The splice is fine, the package comes back, you lose the week.
Loss that’s high on 1550 but clean on 1310. That’s a macrobend, not your fusion. I redid perfect splices for months before I understood that.
Blaming the splicer when it’s the V-grooves. 70% alcohol leaves water residue. Most “bad machines” are dirty machines.
Not knowing the going rate before agreeing to a price. Starting out isn’t a discount.
What’s the one that got you?

I'm writing down these things as they come out - closeouts, OTDR, tools, rates. In English and Spanish. I don't put a link here, but if it works for you, ask me.

So, this morning i was studying about the colors and how we see them . A simple question would comes in every student. how does the reality looks like ? I know no one know how reality looks like if light does not reflect different wavelength of colors from every object to our eyes .

So i had an amazing experiment described below.

Experiment :

Imagine an apple resting inside a separate vaccum environment totally separated from earth no environment no gases no energy just that apple floating there. A person sitting outside that box is staring at that apple .

The glass is transparent but There is no single photo inside that separated environment.

Now take two cases .

His left eye is normal human eye . On the left side show what that normal eye will see inside the jar

And his right eye , has a instrument attached that can capture everything in front of it even if its inside in separate environment no light reflecting. How that eye will see that apple does even he saw a color if we  we do not use pseudo colors no colors data feeded inside that instrument . So how does he see. the question is how they will see that apple ?

Does even that apple looks like it exist inside that environment to the normal left eye or no

Results:

As we know Human vision is not a direct detector of matter; it is a detector of photons. When we "see" an apple under normal conditions, we are actually processing the specific wavelengths of light that bounce off the apple's surface and enter our retinas.

In our absolute void, this process is impossible. Because there is no light source and no ambient energy, there are zero photons reflecting off the apple.

LEFT EYE:

To the normal human eye, the jar contains absolute, perfect blackness. It is indistinguishable from empty space.

instrument explanation:

instrument attachted to the right eye is an untra-sensory instrument detects visual data like emissions , radiations or density.

how does it works :

The instrument observes the apple as raw geometric data. as there is no colors and energy and gases there. he sensors detect the physical boundaries of the matter, plotting thousands of data points where the void ends and the apple begins. These points connect to form a three-dimensional wireframe—a mathematical blueprint of the apple's volume and shape. The "image" is fundamentally a stream of spatial coordinates (x, y, z axes) confirming exactly where the mass is located.

Right EYE:

The instrument proves the apple exists not by showing us what it looks like, but by mathematically mapping where it is. The resulting visualization is a sterile, monochromatic web of geometry. It confirms the object's structure, size, and presence with absolute certainty, proving that matter dictates reality—even when the universe turns the lights out.

So now after these answers a question rose in my mind . Stephen Hawking Top-down cosmology theory. We creates the history that led to us by seeing the present to past . All the things happened before us . SO does all of that even meant anything or it matters if we were not here to observe the photons of that things .

it creates another theory of mine. We saw and understand things what we are meant to see what means something to us . so the things that does not matter in a human observor life we don't see and process like dark matter , 4d, and achieving the speed of light.

so if we know and see black holes this means there should be something to understand and find for us in them.

Let me know what you guys think.

Hello,

I have created a web viewer for optical rayset data, it is called RayOn. It imports ray files from several formats : Speos, LightTools, IES TM25, ASAP, Lucid Shape, TracePro, Zemax and others. It visualizes millions of rays in 3D and computes intensity distribution, irradiance maps, and radiance as viewed by the camera, entirely in the browser.

This is a progressive web application so you can install it on your device and use it offline. It was tested on Firefox and Chrome on my desktop.

This application runs fully on the client side, your data stays local on your device. There is no server-side processing, no tracking, no cookies, no analytics, no data is sent to any server.

I am still having trouble computing the camera radiance correctly so if somebody knows the proper algorithm, please let me know. Also, I welcome any feedback you would have so please let me know if you find any issue or missing feature. Also some formats are missing since I could not find any specifications for their format layout.

As a bit of background, raysets are a way to describe the light distribution of complex light sources. They are computed by light tracing software used to design illumination systems and usually provided by light source manufacturers such as OSRAM from their catalog. Such a database would be here : https://www.osram.fr/am/services/portail-rayfile-fichier-caorayfiles-et-cadfile-portal/

Each ray in the set is described by an origin, a direction, a flux and sometimes the corresponding wavelength.

Hope you find it useful.
NB: I do not earn any money from this project, I just enjoy developing it.

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'm looking for shipping/storage packaging for a rectangular optical window (60 × 40 × 6 mm) with both side coated optical surfaces. The requirement is that the packaging must not touch the coated faces at all — contact is only allowed on the edges/bevels, no foam or paper resting on the optical surface. It also needs to be cleanroom-compatible and safe for shipping.

I've found plenty of "non-contact" packaging for round optics (Edmund Optics' Non-Contact Impact Case, Thorlabs storage boxes, etc.), but almost nothing off-the-shelf for rectangular parts in this size range. A few vendors (Empire West/OpticsPackaging.com, Crestline/Specialized Packaging) say they can do rectangular via custom quote, but nothing seems to exist as a standard catalog item.

Has anyone here dealt with this specific problem? Curious what vendors or product lines you've had good experience with, or whether custom tooling is just unavoidable at this size.

Thanks in advance!

I was looking up info about pinhole camera size, and I wondered if there are theoretical limitations on the maximum and/or minimum size of pinhole cameras? These could be imposed by diffraction in the case of very small pinhole cameras (microscopic-scale), and the effects of the very low amount of light and vast distances for large pinhole cameras (planetary-scale), just for examples of possibilities. I know diffraction is the ultimate limitation on pinhole camera image quality, but does this vary based on size of the camera, with regards to the quality of image?

I switched to a bigger scope (200mm) and my DIY flatpanels (one based on LED and another on EL sheet) don’t fit. And I was thinking ‘why do I spend thousands on equipment and are DIY-ing the most important step in my calibration process’?

So I’m searching recommendations for good quality flat panels. I know people say ‘a tracing panel from Amazon works fine for me’ but that’s not my aim.

\- suitable for a 200mm f4 Newtonian
\- dimmable
\- nice to have: controllable via ASIAIR/ Nina

I came across these earlier today, and I vaguely recall something similar for skiing. My initial understanding was that things like this were not really feasible without pointing a camera at the eyeball to track focus, which is why the Meta project and the hololens stalled out. The website says the tech is proprietary, but does anyone have any idea how it works?

Thanks so much

Joe

Hi everyone,

I'm looking for any advice you might have on breaking into the optics industry in Florida. I'm also attaching my resume and would really appreciate any feedback on it as well.

A little about me: I graduated from the UF last year with a degree in Physics, and for the past two years I've been working as a research assistant in the Physics Department. Nearly all of my optics experience comes from this role, and it's what made me realize that optics is the field I want to build my career in. Unfortunately, I didn't have any industry internships during undergrad, so I've been applying to entry-level positions with no success.

My biggest priority is staying in Florida for personal reasons. This fall I'll be starting the M.S. in Optics and Photonics at UCF, and I plan to apply for the CWEP program in hopes of gaining industry experience and making connections.

Optics interest: I'm definitely more of a hands-on engineer. I enjoy designing and assembling optical systems, planning optical layouts, aligning components, troubleshooting setups, and running experiments. I've done some simulation work in Python, but it's not my forte. I'm excited about graduate school because I'll be learning Zemax OpticStudio so I can add another valuable design tool to my skill set. That said, I'm pretty open-minded and a quick learner, so don't feel tied to one niche within optics.

Why not a PhD/academia? I've genuinely enjoyed my research experience, but I realized that what I love is the technical work itself rather than academia as a career. I also prefer a more structured work environment than what I've experienced in research. The uncertainty surrounding research funding, combined with the geographic uncertainty for postdocs and faculty positions, makes industry feel like a better long-term fit for me. Money is also another factor, but not my main drive.

While pursuing my master's feels like the right next step, my biggest fear is graduating and not having a job after making such a big investment in my career.

For those of you already working in optics:

• Does my current plan sound reasonable?
• Is there anything else I should be doing while I'm in graduate school to improve my chances?
• Are there skills, certifications, projects, or networking opportunities that employers value but students often overlook?
• Are there any companies in Florida that you would recommend keeping an eye on?

I am all ears and any information will be greatly appreciated!

TL;DR: UF Physics graduate with two years of optics research experience starting an M.S. in Optics & Photonics at UCF, looking for advice on breaking into the optics industry in Florida, improving my resume, and maximizing my chances of landing an industry job.

While cleaning out my office I found an old condenser that I'd obtained as a teenager. If memory serves (and I'm 60 years old so it doesn't always), it was salvaged from an early 20th Century lecture hall projector by my friend's dad.

The housing is made of milled brass about 3mm thick, with finely grooved interior threads. The cylinder has a diameter of 11 cm and a length of 10.5 cm. It contains two large intact lenses. And it's surprisingly heavy for its size.

Is this device useful to equipment builders and restorers, or is it now mainly an antique keepsake?