Capabilities
New product developments are often limited by engineering resources. Our dedicated development team helps you bridge that gap and speed your time to market with innovative solutions to your design challenges.
- System Integration: Plug-and-play solutions from sub-assemblies to complete systems
- Contract System Development: Spectrometers, light sources, and accessories designed to your requirements
- Mass customization: Customer-specific product specifications to ensure quality, guarantee unit-to-unit consistency, allow for application specific test criteria, and lock firmware and design changes
- Consultation: Optical, mechanical, electrical, software, firmware, and system engineers to guide and support you from product integration to volume manufacture
- Production ramp-up: ISO-certified manufacturing facilities on 3 continents supporting up to 140,000 spectrometers & systems per year
Explore our capabilities
Development Tools
- Zemax optical modeling: Ray tracing to determine the optimal combination of lenses, slits, gratings, mirrors, fibers, filters, flow cells, and other optical components
- Breadboard prototyping: Testing on vibration-stabilized optical tables to optimize and characterize key performance metrics like throughput, sensitivity, optical resolution, signal-to-noise ratio and long-term stability
Design Options
- Custom illumination system (light source + focusing/collimation optics)
- Light collection optics, including lenses, fibers and optical filters
- Integrated wavelength calibration source with electronic control
- Dual path absorption system design
- Alternative spectrometer detectors with shuttering, short integration time, low high sensitivity, etc.
- Shutters for sample cell, light source, calibration lamp
- Optical feedback loop with photodiode to maintain constant intensity output of light source
- Keyed SMA connector to spectrometer with multiple fibers coming from different sample locations
Development Tools
- Circuit card assemblies: Designed to control optoelectonic components, including spectrometers, lamps, shutters, lasers, LED’s, actuators, thermoelectric coolers, and more
- Power management circuits: To distribute clean power from international mains, rechargeable cells, or replaceable batteries across multiple subsystems at different voltages.
- Processing and output components: High-speed output connectors for rapid data acquisition, integrated microprocessors for onboard post-processing, extra opcodes for control of custom devices, custom trigger modes, etc.
- Microcontroller firmware and FPGA VHDL: For execution on chips, including the PIC24, Spartan-6, Cypress FX-2, and NXP LPC
- Multiple communications protocols: USB, RS232/422, Ethernet, WiFi, Bluetooth, SPI, I2C, etc.
- CE testing & approval
Design Options
- Circuit card assembly (CCA) to automate integrated wavelength calibration of spectrometer (including control of light source vs calibration source)
- Integration time as short as 4 µs to capture rapid timescale or high intensity events
- Interface circuit to trigger laser, LED, or other light source
- Alternative detectors with shutter options
- Integration of USB ports and hub for spectrometer, auxiliary, and data export use
- Readouts for light source temperature, battery life
- Rechargeable battery and charging power supply to drive components: light source, spectrometer, USB hub, etc.
- Control of vaporizing coil and other customer-supplied components
- Spectrometer control via custom processor, like Blackfin run with a Linux operating system
Development Tools
- Solid Works: Design of plastic and metal casings, optical mountings, field-exchangeable sub-assemblies, and environmentally-sealed connections and fittings
- 3D printer for rapid prototyping
- Thermal simulation & testing: Modeling to anticipate and compensate for system heat build-up, followed by validation using environmental control chambers to test system performance across a range of expected temperature extremes
- Shock and vibration mitigation: Design tolerancing to ensure systems survive rough handling encountered in transport and field operations, backed by third-party testing as needed
Design Options
- Pelican case to house full system for field use
- Automated fan cooling systems with feedback loops to temperature of spectrometer/light source
- Thermo-electric cooler (TEC) and circuit for external temperature stabilization of spectrometer
- Full liquid sampling system with flow cell and syringe delivery
Development Tools
- Programming languages: Java, C#, C++, C, LabVIEW, MATLAB, Objective-C, Python, Ruby, Perl, Delphi and Visual Basic
- Platforms supported: Excel/VBA, Android, iOS Apps, embedded Linux micro-computers, smartphone apps, tablet GUIs, PanelPC installations, laptop and desktop clients
- Data management: Cloud-backed databases, encrypted signature library distribution, remote field sample collection
Design Options
- Integrated laptop computer with installed custom software
- Onboard touchscreen computer
- Custom software programs adapted for lab, field, and quality control use
- Custom firmware to interpolate between pixels and read out data at consistent, fixed wavelengths from unit to unit
- Multilingual software interfaces
- Principal component analysis routines
- Remote data return via WiFi dump
- Red/yellow/green traffic light-style interface for field-deployed systems in non-technical fields
- Alternate spectrometer interfaces: SPI, i2C, National Instruments USB module
- Custom firmware to run USB bus