Photon Engineering, LLC announced the release of FRED 12.31. This is a major version release which offers new features designed to make optical system engineering in FRED even more efficient. Highlights of the new features and enhancements in this release are:
• M-squared laser beam: This simplified source model has been added to give users the ability to create a coherent Gaussian beam with designated m-squared values in X and Y. The source is created by linearly combining several TEMmn modes to give the requested M2 value.
• Spectral analysis: This new feature has been added to create a spectral power distribution for a filtered ray set. The feature can use the ray selection criteria from an analysis surface or directional analysis entity to select the rays of interest. The result is added to the Spectra folder on the object tree as a new spectrum node.
• Q-con and Q-bfs surfaces: These surface types have been added as native surface types; they are now also supported in the Zemax and CodeV lens import routines.
• Ray file wavelengths: Rays that are generated from ray files can now use wavelength information directly from the ray file itself (assuming the ray file contains spectral data). This means that spectral content from ProSource ray files, for example, should be accurately represented by the FRED source model without requiring additional modification. In addition, users now have the option to read and write wavelength data to and from FRED’s native compact ray file format (*.fcr).
• Ideal lens module: An alternative to FRED’s Eikonal-based lens modules has been added; it removes some of the practical limitations of the Eikonal lenses and relaxes the strict path-length accuracy requirements in exchange for convenience. The new lens surface behaves more like a paraxial lens construct and allows three angle-mapping functions to be specified; f-tan (theta), f-theta and f-sin (theta).
• New element primitives: Four new element primitive types have been added to FRED’s primitives’ palette; they allow simple and fast creation of some basic components without requiring the user to construct them from scratch using custom elements. The new element primitives that have been added are: truncated ellipsoid, frustum, cylinder lens and compound parabolic concentrator (CPC).
• Custom 2D charts: The scripting language now allows users to create custom 2D charts by adding, deleting and modifying multiple data series of a chart object. Access to the ComponentOne Chart2D object is also provided, which allows the user to customise the charts in a manner equivalent to using the advanced chart options in the graphical user interface (GUI).
• Multi-threaded tessellation: A new visualisation preference has been added that allows models to be tessellated using multi-threading and can tremendously reduce the tessellation time for large models.
• Minor improvements:
◊ Analysis results nodes now have several data modification routines directly available from the tree menu or via scripting;
◊ Updated COM scripting to allow client/server communication between FRED and 3rd party programs (including Python and Matlab);
◊ General bug fixes.
You may download the free demo version at this website.
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