Like my glasses?

Today I went to the SPIE Photonics West trade show with Skip Adrian from Laser Center/Edge Finder. Exciting right! There is a lot of stuff there I don't understand but I chatted with a few suppliers about creating custom optics for my lights. I'm going to need some traction before I can afford custom manufacturing, but I've found a lot of off the shelf optics just aren't that good, even though they are designed for the LED's I'm using.

I do some consulting work for Skip. I designed the polarizing attachment for his tool that allows the laser spot to be "focused" into a much smaller dot. His tools are used for setting up and aligning CNC and manual machine tools. If you are a machinist you should check out his site! I use one (well, several) on both my manual and CNC mill. It can turn a five minute setup routine into a 30 second setup routine

He was tracking down some new line generating lenses and I was taking up the valuable time of many companies that I will never buy anything from...but they make such cool stuff! Yes, I'm a tech geek if that isn't already painfully obvious. You should have seen the mini-displays: 1280x960 pixels in a package less than an inch square! Not cheap.

I was also checking out these AWESOME laser protection glasses. Clearly, my new avatar. I did manage to resist purchasing them though. Right now, I'm thinking that was a mistake. Is there still time to run back before the show is over? 

I also found some goodies that I want to use in another lighting project. My curiosity strikes again. I often have trouble focusing on only one project, so I'll have to keep this one in the notebook for now. Trying to stay on task! Pretty cool though eh? These are some very high end LED assemblies that are used in machine vision applications. The blue ring is about 4 inches in diameter, has about 200 micro LEDs, and runs about 600 bucks. Yowch.