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Comment by VLM | Hacker News Reader

"when your optics are going to be a much larger cost than the mechanical mounts"

It would be nice if that were always the case. I suspect this is very much like my electronics stuff, a $2 MMIC amp mounted in a $30 aluminum diecast box. You can blow a lot of money on chassis and component mounting.

Also, speed. Could print something where an exact model just drops in place with superglue and a perfect fit. I could probably replicate their chassis in aluminum by hand in a days work, but I'd much rather go lazy and print one. Also each engineering revision drops from "days work" to "hit print and come back later"

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A custom housing could certainly be on the order or more expensive than the optics, but if you were using catalog parts the mechanics should not be the largest cost.

For example, a "cheap" 1" notch filter from Thor would run about $500, whereas a kinematic mount would be somewhere closer to $40.

For Raman spectroscopy, a "cheap" notch filter won't even work. a 0.5" long pass filter made for Raman can easily cost $2000. When you have a $2000 filter, you have to use temperature stabilized laser, otherwise the laser wavelength shifts, thus, spectrum shifts. Grating and concave mirror can also cost a fortune.

Also, Raman typically is very weak, roughly 10^-6 of the laser intensity. The CCD/CMOS has to be low dark count.

The things is, if you have spent $5000 on components, why should you save couple hundreds of dollar on good optical mounts?

This 3D printed plastic base/structure will never have good stability and precision for any serious scientific application.

Nonsense, you can run a perfectly good student lab with a cheap notch filter and pull a usable spectra off something like polystyrene or Tylenol. What I'm wondering is if this thing could even do that. Looking at the abuse the diffraction grating has taken suggests the answer is no.

As far as a decent scientific bench instrument goes, we're mostly in agreement. I'd love to know if you could make a decent optomechanic system like this on a SLS with a metal substrate.

Curious: what are you doing with microwaves?

Radio's always interested me but I haven't done anything with it since high school.

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