Today we released version 1.2.25 of our tool.
One of the main changes is the way we handle materials by supplier name. The material properties will now be displayed as a tooltip to have the user interface less crowded:
If you want to change a property of a material, please first select it in the “By supplier name” mode and then change to “Custom” material. The properties of the selected material will appear. From there you can adjust the ones you need.
The second is the ability to detect if pea puffer aspheres are cheaper than the normal way of fabricating the lens. With pea puffer aspheres a bigger lens than originally specified is created and then centered down to the one specified. This allows it to use a broader spectrum of technologies. The result is that in some cases where it was not possible to fabricate the original lens, it’s now possible to do it. In addition, it can happen that a cheaper technology moves in and the overall fabrication cost can be reduced. For more details, please take a look at the following paper: The PanDao tool will show if pea puffer aspheres are used in the following way:
Also, there is now an option to disable the usage of pea puffer aspheres:
Please note that now it can happen, that for the same lens different costs for the centering and material are calculated for the cheapest and the fastest chain. The reason for this is that pea puffer aspheres can have additional centering cost and different lens diameters. PanDao will display the costs for both chains in the result. The CSV summary changed because of this as well, and it can happen, that your old results are not formatted correctly. To solve this, please download the existing CSV file as a backup and then press the “Delete old CSV entries” button.
In addition, we also made some smaller changes:
- The options tap was renamed to cockpit to have it in line with the demo
- Technology readiness level is now shown in the report
- The message displayed when using poisonous materials like chalcogenide glasses has been overworked.
We often get asked what supplier we can recommend for a specific design. To provide this information to our users, we now want to give fabrication companies the opportunity to display their sales contact information in the PanDao result. The company will only be displayed if it owns the needed technologies needed for the design. If you are interested in this option, please get in touch with us. The following picture gives an example how a possible result could look:
The entry is also customizable if you want to display a phone number, contacting webpage or something similar.
We also renamed Applicability to Technology readiness level in the cockpit tab.
As always, we updated our internal technology database. This time, a lot of tooling costs changed, so make sure to rerun your recent lenses to check for new results.