Design of a Highly Manufacturable Macro Probe Photography Lens Objective

Last Updated: 11/28/22

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.

The starting patent design for the macro probe lens. There are any issues that could pose problems for manufacturing yield that are illustrated in the photo.

The lens solution that arrived at. The issues illustrated in the starting lens image have been rectified. This is simply a first pass design and there are some improvements that could be made to increase manufacturability. I go into detail on the Manufacturing and Tolerances and Conclusion sections of my paper.

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

Korts_Andrew_OPT444_FinalProject_FinalReport.pdf