Moving the Focus Rails

Written by Tom Nugent on Thursday, November 8th, 2007

Before the competition, we didn’t talk much about our optics, for obvious reasons. But now that it’s over, we feel more comfortable showing off parts of our system. For example, we had an automated tracking vehicle system which was hooked up to the laser optics, changing the focus of the optics as the vehicle moved further away. Below is a video showing the focus rails being moved by manual control, at varying speeds. The mirrors are wrapped in brown tissue paper to protect them during testing. The movement is quite smooth and reproducible, and certainly makes an interesting sound.

You can also download the movie as a Quicktime version (2.9MB, Quicktime 7 required).