Case study: Piezo focus system enables portable cytometers, expands access to healthcare in resource-limited settings. A customer wanted to create a backpack-portable blood analyzer for use in resource-limited settings that do not have access to institutional laboratory instruments and services. New Scale’s miniature precision focus system helped to make it possible.
Patents cover a new rotary piezoelectric motor that achieves very high rotational speed with significant torque in a very small diameter, and a compact wide-angle optical beam steering assembly that has been commercialized in the M3-RS-U Rotary Smart Stages and beam steering developer’s kits.
Miniature M3-FS Focus Module and M3-LS Linear Smart Stage with built-in controllers have new, dramatically improved lifetime specification of >10 million moves.
New Scale worked with NASA JPL/Caltech to design and manufacture a fiber optic positioning system using rotary piezoelectric SQUIGGLE micro motors for the Prime Focus Spectrograph (PFS). The PFS is a fiber fed multi-object spectrometer for the Subaru Telescope that will conduct a variety of targeted surveys for studies of dark energy, galaxy evolution, and galactic archaeology. The key to the instrument is a high density array of fiber positioners placed at the prime focus of the Subaru Telescope. The system, nicknamed the “Cobra” fiber positioner, will be capable of rapidly reconfiguring the array of 2,394 optical fibers to the image positions of astronomical targets in the focal plane with high accuracy.
The M3-RS-U two-axis beam steering system with built-in controller was the most popular demo in our booth at Photonics West and Bios 2016. Here are a few of the questions that we answered most often at the show.
M3 micro-mechatronics modules are “all in-one” smart modules, with the controller and position sensor built in to the miniature module. This embedded closed-loop control gives you the smallest size, fastest and simplest integration into your system, and lowest total cost.
When the application requires, M3 Smart Modules can also move using open-loop commands from the SPI, I2C or UART interface. This is particularly useful in applications that have an external sensor with better resolution than the internal sensor, or where very fast “step and settle” performance is required.
Article: New Scale’s micro beam steering solutions for handheld devices are among Laser Focus World’s Top 20 Technology Picks for 2015.
