Foresight Systems Development, Inc. : Custom Opto-Mechanical Design, Prototypes, and Products

Foresight's Design Leadership begins with good communication. By understanding our client's requirements, and fostering dynamic collaboration with the client's design team, Foresight stays in sync with your development needs and is an available and informed partner.

Project phases are carefully planned with the complete product design cycle in mind. A testing stratgy is developed to measure product performance, and milestones are established to track team performance. During this process, Foresight's role on your team becomes well defined and we agree on the set of deliverables that will be most beneficial to your project. Our deliverables usually begin with a "paper study" followed by a prototype build, and prototype characterization.

When engineering, Foresight’s principal design philosophy is that simple solutions work best. Design time is spent on elegance, error budgeting, and tolerance analysis. State-of-the-art solid CAD tools (SolidWorks) facilitate design iteration and analysis.

Opto-mechanical performance is modelled with ZEMAX software. By understanding system sensitivities and error budgets, optimal assembly and/or adjustment schemes can be developed. Monte Carlo analysis may also be performed to characterize statistical performance of a manufactured product. Predictive power of the Zemax model is enhanced by fine tuning the model to reproduce lab measurements of the prototypes.

Foresight maintains an in-house machine shop reserved for modification and rework of prototypes. With each iteration, we evaluate perfomance in our optics lab, and identify new modifications that will further improve the system performance. Often several iterations can happen within a day. As the prototypes evolve to closely resemble product, they can also be used as tradeshow demos and sales tools.

Reconciling prototype performance with model predictions allows for development of better designs and design tools. Troubleshooting occurs "upstream" of costly design and manufacturing investment. Manufacturing sensitivities are anticipated, risks can be managed, and appropriate designs evolve at a rapid pace.