Design of a Highly Manufacturable Macro Probe Photography Lens Objective

In my lens design class, OPT444 led by Julie Bentley, the semester ends with a capstone project. We were tasked with finding an application that was meaningful/interesting to us and then design, innovate upon, or explore a lens that applies to that application. For my project, I chose to explore and innovate upon the Laowa 24mm Macro Probe Lens with an emphasis on making it more manufacturable. For the project I focused on the lens objective. But I expect that the principles employed in my approach could be mimicked in design the other subsystems as well.

This project was very intriguing to me because I have been obsessed with this lens since I found out about it in high school. I am also very interested in manufacturing processes and like to focus on improving them. Upon my initial analysis, the performance was nowhere near the specification I had derived for the objective. The most likely explanation for this is that the aberrations were balanced throughout the entire system. But I still think there were several key things that could be improved about the objective.

You can read all about my project in the report below: