Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens

INTRODUCTION
This is a very basic tutorial that covers how to enter lens data in OSLO and perform a simple optimization.
The end of this tutorial describes how to use slider wheels in order to explore changing some of your
system parameters. While not true optimization, slider wheels can be a valuable to asset to understanding
how your system behaves with different design conditions.
This tutorial is written so that it can be performed using all editions of OSLO (including OSLO-EDU). As
a result, the optimization section does not describe some of the fuller (and more convenient) features found
in OSLO Standard and Premium. However, the optimization section of this tutorial does provide some
initial insight into using the OCM operand array which is available as a user defined error function element
in all editions of OSLO.
The overall goal is not only to learn the mechanics of entering data, but also to learn how to apply some of
the standard tools in OSLO to gain an understanding of the optical performance of a simple landscape lens.
You will see during the exercise that design with OSLO is quite different from most software. You don't set
up the system and then press an Auto key that lets the computer optimize it for you. Instead, you work in a
highly interactive mode, taking small steps so you can understand what is happening as you progress
towards a solution.

OUTLINE

The steps in the exercise are as follows:

• Lens entry - Enter a single convex-plano lens with a displaced aperture stop behind the lens.
o The system will be used with an object placed at infinity, an entrance beam radius of
10mm and a field angle of ±20 degrees
o The initial radius of curvature of the convex front face will be 50. The thickness of the
BK7 lens will be 4mm.
o The initial distance to the displaced aperture behind the lens will be 10.
o Set the thickness from the aperture stop to the image surface using a marginal ray height
solve
• Lens Drawing - Set up the lens drawing conditions to show desired ray trajectories.
o Remember to force the image surface to be drawn
• Optimization - Optimize the lens so it has no coma, and a focal length of 100
o Create an error function that:
ƒ Controls the effective focal length to be 100 (remember that you can do this by
controlling the exiting slope of the marginal (axial) ray
ƒ Forces the 3rd order coma to be zero.
o Remember to allow some system parameters to vary during the optimization. Good
candidates are the curvature of the first surface (will change the power of the lens)
and the position of the aperture stop (the location of the stop directly affect
coma).
• Slider-wheel design - Attach sliders to parameters so you can analyze system trade-offs
(Remember to place a thickness solve on the aperture stop surface).

1
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 2 of 16
o Attach one slider to the curvature of the 2nd lens surface and one slider to the curvature of
the final image plane.
o Experiment with adjusting the sliders and observe what happens to the on-axis and off-
axis spot diagrams.
o By adjusting the curvature of the image surface try to observe the positions of the
vertically and horizontally astigmatic off-axis spots

DETAIL

It is important that you start this Detail section with the same OSLO configuration as we did when the
tutorial was written. If you have changed many preferences before starting this exercise, you can restore
your preferences to factory-default condition by deleting the file [Link] in your private/bin directory.
Normally this will not be required.
In the following detailed steps, many of the words you need to type and actions you need to perform will be
highlighted with "quotes" so they stand out from the rest of the tutorial text. The quotes are only there to
increase readability of this document. Do not type the quotes.
Lens entry
This first part of the Detail section of the tutorial deals with entering the basic elements of a new lens.
Using the following detailed steps.
1) Choose "File>>New Lens…" from the OSLO menu

2) In the resulting "File new" dialog box, enter the file name "Landscape1", select Custom lens and enter 3
surfaces, then click on the OK button.
A new spreadsheet will appear where you can enter data in almost all the spreadsheet cells. Note that at
the top of the spreadsheet, permanent text and user editable text exist in the same cell.

3) Fill out the fixed portion spreadsheet (the top section above the double line) with the following data.
3a) At the top of the spreadsheet type "Landscape 1" in the cell directly to the right of "Lens:".
3b) Changes the entrance beam radius to 5
3c) Changes the field angle to 20.
3d) Leave the other cells with their default values.
4) In the scrolled area of the spreadsheet (the section below the double line) make the following changes
4a) Enter "BK7" in the "GLASS" column on surface 1. This will make the material between surfaces 1 and
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 3 of 16
2 be the optical glass material "BK7". If this is confusing, re-read the Quick Start chapter in the OSLO
Optics Reference describing how the Surface Data Spreadsheet works. Please note that the Object row is
considered row 0 for the following steps.
4b) In row 3, click the button in the "APERTURE RADIUS" cell, then click "Aperture Stop" from the
resulting pop-up list. Note that the row button for row 3 will now say "AST", and A will be added to the
button in the "APERTURE RADIUS" column.
4c) Click in the "RADIUS" cell of row 1, enter 50 for the radius of curvature
4d) Click on the thickness cell in row 1and enter 4 for the thickness
4e) Click on the thickness cell in row 2 and enter 10 for the thickness there.
5) In row 3, instead of entering a thickness directly, click on the button in the thickness cell, and select
"Solves(S)>>Axial ray height…" from the pop-up menus. This will cause a data-entry box to pop-up
prompting for the value of the solve. Accept the default value (0) by clicking OK. This will assure that the
thickness of surface 3 will be constantly updated so that the height of the axial ray will be zero (0) on the
next surface (surface 4).

6) Click the button in the "SPECIAL" column for row 3. Select "Surface Control(F)>>General" from the
resulting pop-up menus. This will cause a whole new spreadsheet to cover up the current spreadsheet.
6a) Click the button that says "Automatic" in the 8th row, and then choose "Drawn" from the resulting pop-
up list. This will force OSLO drawings to explicitly draw surface 3.
6b) Then click the Green check mark in the upper left-hand corner of the spreadsheet to close the
spreadsheet and return to the surface data spreadsheet.
6c) You will now see an F on the special button for row 3.

7) Repeat the sequence of steps 6 through 6c for the special button in row 4.
This completes the basic data entry for your lens. At this point, your spreadsheet should look like the
following.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 4 of 16

8) As a check to make sure everything is correct, make sure you have the same Efl (effective focal length),
and that the buttons have the same labels. The S on the thickness button means that the value is determined
by a solve (the axial ray height solve). The S on the aperture buttons also means that the apertures are
determined by solves. This is the default action for apertures and is based on the entrance beam radius and
the field angle.
9) Click on the Green check mark in the upper left-hand corner to close the spreadsheet and save the lens
by choosing "File>>Save Lens…" from the OSLO menu. You have already indicated that the file name
was to be "[Link]" in step #2 above. The lens will be saved in the current lens directory, which is
normally your private directory.
10) If you want to confirm that the lens is saved there, choose "File>>Open Lens…" from the OSLO menu.
Click on the "Private" Library Directory button at the bottom of the "Open Lens File" dialog. Your lens
"[Link]" should be listed there.
See the section Sideline #1 if you want to learn more about where your lenses are saved.

Lens Drawing
This next part of the Detail section of the tutorial will concentrate on controlling how to draw your lens in
OSLO.
11) Click the "Draw Off" button in the fixed area (top portion) of the lens spreadsheet. A window labeled
"Autodraw" will appear showing the lens that you have entered. If you click on any cell on surface 2 of the
spreadsheet, you will see that the surface corresponding to surface 2 in the "Autodraw" window becomes
dotted. If you were to change any data item for the lens in the surface data spreadsheet, the picture would
be updated automatically.

The Autodraw window is a special window that does not have the full functionality of a regular graphics
window, but is updated automatically, which is not the case for ordinary graphics windows. The lens
picture that is show is drawn according to the standard lens conditions used for all lens drawings. In order
to illustrate this exercise better, we are going to change one of the operating conditions so that the ray
trajectories are drawn all the way to the image surface.
12) From the Lens menu on the main tool bar, select the bottom item, Lens Drawing Conditions. This will
cause the following spreadsheet to cover the lens spreadsheet:
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 5 of 16

13) The item to change on this spreadsheet is called "Image space rays:" You should change it from "Final
dist" to "Draw to image surface".

14) After making the modification, click the Green check to close the spreadsheet. The lens spreadsheet
will reappear, and the Autodraw window will be updated as follows.

Now you can see the details of image formation by the lens. Obviously the off-axis image is not so good.
The main aberration that you see is field curvature; the off-axis image is not formed on a plane surface
perpendicular to the axis, but rather on a curved surface. Unfortunately, there is not too much that can be
done about this.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 6 of 16

Optimization
This next part of the Detail section of the tutorial will concentrate on a small optimization task with your
lens. We will define an error function that makes the focal length exactly 100mm, and also eliminates the
Seidel (3rd order) coma from the image.

15) Choose "Optimize>>Generate Error Function>>Aberration Operands…" from the OSLO menu. You
have just created an error function that OSLO will be able to optimize on.

As a result of step 16, the current spreadsheet will be replaced with the "Operands Data Editor" shown
above. This is the operand list that makes up the error function you just created. The "NAME" column
identifies the role of each of the operands in the list. The "DEFINITION" column refers to the OCM array
element where the value for each operand is defined. At this point we will skip the explanation of what is
happening in the background to fill the array variables OCM1 through OCM21 with the correct data
values. For now it is only sufficient to understand that each operand in your list controls some system
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 7 of 16
parameter defined by the mnemonic in the "NAME" column. For example operand #6 "PLC" controls
"Paraxial Lateral Color".
Unfortunately we do not want to control all these parameters at once during our optimization, and we need
to decide which of the terms will be used for the error function. The initial spreadsheet lists all of the
possibilities, and you must delete the ones you don't want. In this case, the operands to keep are CMA3 and
EFL. All the other should be deleted.
16) To do this, first click and drag from row buttons 11-20, then press the delete key
17) Next click and drag from row buttons 1-9, and then press the delete key again

18) Check that the spreadsheet appears as follows. CMA3 stands for the 3rd order term of the aberration
"Coma", and EFL stands for "Effective Focal Length".

It is important to understand that in OSLO, all operands are targeted to zero. That is, the optimization
algorithm will minimize all of its individual terms. Since the EFL operand is the effective focal length, we
don't want the EFL to be zero, but rather the value of 100.
19) We accommodate this by modifying the definition of the second operand to be OCM21-100, and we
will also change the name to EFL_ERR. Click on the NAME and DEFINITION cells and enter the new
data.

20) Now click the Green check mark in the upper left-hand corner to close the spreadsheet, and click the
"Ope" button in the text window. The current operand values, together with the current value of the error
function, will be listed in the Text window.

The operands of the error function are now defined. From the output in the text window we can see that
currently, the error in the EFL makes up nearly 100% of the total error in the error function. But as we
start to optimize the system and the EFL is corrected, the balance between controlling the EFL to 100 and
the third order coma to zero will be re-established.
Controlling the axial ray slope as it exits the last surface of your lens is an alternate way of controlling the
system EFL for a certain entrance beam radius. To find out how to use the axial ray angle operand to
control your system focal length, see Sideline #2.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 8 of 16
We now need to specify the system parameters that will be varied in order to achieve a good system
optimization. The parameters that we will use are the curvature of the first surface (CV 1), and the distance
between the lens and the aperture stop (TH 2).
21) In the lens spreadsheet, click on the button in the "RADIUS" of Curvature column for surface 1, and
select "Variable(V)" from the options list.

22) Repeat step 21 using the button in the "THICKNESS" cell for surface 2.

23) Check that the appropriate buttons on surface 1 and 2 should now have V's for "Variable" on them.
24) You are now be ready to optimize the lens. But before doing this, close the lens spreadsheet (Green
check) and immediately re-open it. This action saves the current system to an interim buffer (it acts as a
sort of quick save). If something were to go wrong during the optimization, OSLO gives you the
capability, by canceling (red X) from a spreadsheet, to revert to the system that existed when you last
opened the spreadsheet (after closing it with a Green check). By closing and opening the spreadsheet in this
way, you establish a base system to revert to.
25) To optimize, click the "Ite" button in the text window. This button will optimize your system through
10 iteration cycles, if that many are required. You may have noticed that this button was disabled until
you entered both operands and variables.
The text window should show the following output although you might see slightly different numbers in the
columns. You see that the error function has been reduced to essentially zero, indicating that the
variables were appropriate for solving the problem.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 9 of 16

26) Check that the lens spreadsheet below matches your spreadsheet following the optimization. You can
see in the lens spreadsheet that the Efl is exactly 100, as it must be in order to correct the operands.

27) Click the "Abr" button in the text window, and you see all the aberration data for the lens, showing
that PU = -0.05, and that the Seidel coma CMA3 is zero, as requested in the error function operands.

At this point, the initial task has been completed.

28) Close the spreadsheet (Green check) and save the lens.
This will become the base system for the next phase of the exercise, which shows how to use OSLO's slider
window to study the effects of changing other lens parameters. You might want to save another copy of this
system under a different file name (e.g. landscape_bkp.len) so you can always return to a defined starting
point, even if the current lens data is somehow corrupted.

Slider-wheel design
A singlet such as the landscape lens doesn't have very many degrees of freedom, but in this exercise, we
have constrained the back surface of the lens to be a plane. A landscape lens is normally a meniscus form.
Now we will see how to use OSLO's slider-wheel window to find the optimum form. We will also see the
effects of using a curved image surface.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 10 of 16
First, we set up a basic slider-wheel window, attaching the curvatures of surfaces 2 and 4 to sliders. Later,
we show how to use the full power of OSLO's optimization callback to continuously optimize the system
while dragging a slider or rotating the mouse wheel.
29) With the landscape lens as set up in the preceding portion of this exercise, choose "Optimize>>Slider-
Wheel Design…" from the OSLO menu to open the Slider-Wheel Setup spreadsheet.
30) Initially, set the options shown in the figure below.
30a) Click "Spot diagram"
30b) Set "Graphics scale" to 1.0
30c) Select "All points"
30d) Leave the number of sliders at the default (2)
30e) Enter 2 and 4 in the Surfs column, and set the parameters to "Curvature (CV)" for both sliders. You
can do this either by typing "CV" in the cell, or by double clicking in the cell and choosing "Curvature
(CV)" from the resulting pop-up list.

31) Close the spreadsheet (Green check)

You should now see a slider-wheel window and two additional graphics windows (GW 31 & GW 32) on
your screen.
32) If the "GW 31" and "GW32" windows have toolbars, remove them by left-clicking to select a window,
then right-clicking in the window and choosing the Remove Toolbar item.
33) Since the slider-wheel maintains its own graphics windows, you should minimize the normal graphics
output window (GW1). Next, use the Tile windows command on the main window toolbar to tile the
windows. Your overall screen should look similar to the one below.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 11 of 16

The slider-wheel window appears below the spreadsheet. It contains the two sliders that we just set up.
34) Try manipulating the sliders by dragging or clicking as you would with a normal scroll bar (the sliders
are in fact scroll bars), or by using the mouse wheel. To use the mouse wheel with a slider, place the
pointer anywhere in a slider and rotate the wheel. If you pull a slider too far in either direction you may
create an error condition. If this happens just reset the spreadsheet curvature entries for surface 2 and 4
back to their original values.
The mouse wheel is usually preferred (if it is installed and properly supported on your computer). For a
quick description on how to manipulate the slider as well as determine and control the settings of your
mouse wheel, see Sideline #3
35) Note that the spot diagrams show what the image looks like at the center, zone, and edge of the field.
The elliptical shape is characteristic of a system with astigmatism, but no coma. Now you can drag the
sliders or rotate your mouse wheel to see what happens. Actually, if you do not use the mouse wheel, you
would be better advised to click on a button at the end of a slider rather than drag, so you can move in small
enough steps.
36) Move the slider to make CV[2] negative. The lens becomes positive and the focal length gets smaller.
This is pretty much what you would expect. The image quality changes, since the system is no longer free
of coma. If you change the curvature too much (< -0.033) the ray trace will fail. If this happens, click OK to
dismiss the error box, then move the slider back towards the center.
37) Move the slider to make CV[2] positive. The lens becomes first a meniscus with a long focal length,
but eventually the lens becomes negative; the beam diverges and the display blows up. After you have
experimented with CV[2], set it back to zero.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 12 of 16
38) Try changing CV[4] (the curvature of the image surface). you see that by making it negative, you can
improve the size of the image off-axis, and in fact you can find a position where there is a line focus in the
horizontal direction (tangential focus), or the vertical direction (sagittal focus). This is indicative of a
system with no coma. If you set CV[2] to a value where the system has substantial coma (try -.020) you
will not be able to achieve this. This shows what designers mean when they say that you can't focus out
coma.
The slider-wheel analysis you have observed so far is perhaps interesting, but the real power of sliders in
OSLO comes when you allow the program to re-optimize the system as you drag a slider.
39) Reset the curvatures to zero. If you have adjusted other system parameters during this process, you
may want to re-open the lens that you saved at step 29.
40) Re-open the slider spreadsheet (Optimize>>Slider Wheel Design). In the Slider-wheel-Setup dialog,
set "Enable sw_callback CCL function" to On, and set the "Level" to 2.

41) To invoke this new change to the slider setup, choose the Green Check to close the Slider-wheel Setup.

A callback function is a command that gets executed whenever some event happens in the program.
Callback functions are the essence of a windows program, and OSLO has several of them, many written in
CCL (such as sw_callback.ccl). Generally, these are not complicated routines written by computer
programmers, but simple actions set up by users. For more information on exploring the callback routine
used here, see Sideline #4
42)To see what this does, close the slider window. You should not see any change in the system, because it
was already optimized, but you will see text out similar to the following. As you move a slider, you will see
the numbers flash in the text output window as the system is re-optimized.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 13 of 16
43) In the graphics windows, you will see a quite different scenario from before. To begin, drag the CV[2]
slider to make it more positive. This makes the lens into a meniscus, but now the focal length is held
constant by virtue of the first curvature's being continually re-optimized. Moreover, the aperture stop
surface moves as the coma is continually re-optimized to zero. The image surface is held in the paraxial
image plane by the height solve on surface 3, and the diameter of the lens is adjusted by the aperture solves
so that the beam from the edge of the field of view can pass through the system. The effect of all of this is
that the stop initially moves away from the lens as it becomes a meniscus, but as the bending becomes
larger, the stop shift reverses and the aperture stop moves back towards the lens. The following shows what
you should observe when the surface 2 curvature has values 0.01, and 0.04 (n.b. the images pertain to
center-to-edge, not to bottom-to-top; the bottom spot is the on-axis image).

Of course, the spherical aberration of the system is not constant, and the improvement in image quality at
the edge of the field comes at the expense of a poorer on-axis image. This leads to a consideration of what
might be accomplished by using an aspheric lens, but that is beyond the scope of this introductory exercise,
whose purpose is to introduce OSLO data entry and the general steps for using the slider-wheel window.

SIDELINE #1

If you want to confirm where the lens is saved, you can enter the command shp lfil (show_preference
lensfile) in the command line. The file name will appear in the message area.

SIDELINE #2

In step #15 above, we found that the by choosing "Optimize>>Generate Error Function>>Aberration
Operands…" from the OSLO menu, we generated the following operand set:
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 14 of 16

Instead of controlling EFL, here we want to control the slope of the paraxial axial ray as it leaves the lens
(PU). So in this case we want to keep the PU and CMA3 operands. All the other should be deleted.
16) To do this, first click and drag from row buttons 11-21, then press the delete key
17) Next click and drag from row buttons 3-9, and then press the delete key again. Finally, click row
button 1 and press the delete key

18) Check that the spreadsheet appears as follows. PU stands for the paraxial axial ray slope leaving the
lens (the term PU is standard optics convention and is used frequently in OSLO), and CMA3 stands for the
3rd order term of the aberration "Coma".

We will be using the slope of the axial ray leaving the lens to control the lens f-number. So we need to
modify the definition of the first operand, PU. In OSLO, all operands are targeted to zero. That is, the
optimization algorithm will minimize all of its individual terms. Since the PU operand is the axial ray slope
leaving the lens. We don't want this to be zero, but rather the value that will make the lens have an f-
number of 10, which was prescribed in the initial data.
19) Since the f-number is -1/(2*PU) (when the object is at infinity) the desired value for PU is -.05. We
accommodate this by modifying the definition of the first operand to be OCM2+0.05, and we will also
change the name to PU_ERR. Click on the NAME and DEFINITION cells and enter the new data.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 15 of 16

20) Now click the Green check mark in the upper left-hand corner to close the spreadsheet, and click the
"Ope" button in the text window. The current operand values, together with the current value of the error
function, will be listed in the Text window.

The operands of the error function are now defined. As a sanity check, let's go over what we did in the last
few steps. If the error function is minimized to zero, the value of PU will be forced to -0.05. This is
because the relevant operand PU+.05 (remember that OCM2 contains the value of PU) will be forced to
zero. We know that the focal length of a lens is -EBR/PU (where EBR is the Entrance Beam Radius) so
this, in turn, will force the focal length to be 100. We also know that the system f-number is equal to
EFL/(2*EBR) and this equals 10 which is the desired value. Through the use of the OCM10 array
variable, we will also force the system 3rd order coma to be zero during the optimization.
You can now return to the regular tutorial and continue starting with step #21.

SIDELINE #3

To change the settings of your mouse wheel, you need to first find out what they are at present. To do this,
double click on the status bar in the main OSLO window. This will pop up a dialog box as shown below.
Navigate to the first empty field, click on the combo box, and select Mouse wheel speed, as shown.
Introductory Exercise - Landscape Lens 16 of 16
Click OK to dismiss the box. You should see an additional field in the status bar, as shown. OSLO supports
two mouse-wheel speeds: fast and slow. Slow means one event per wheel notch; fast means several events
per wheel notch (however many you set up in the mouse dialog in your computer's control panel). You
change between fast and slow by clicking the mouse button itself. Generally in OSLO, you will prefer
Slow.
If you experiment, you will see that the slider-wheel window can be dragged anywhere on the display, even
outside the OSLO window. Also, you will see that you can drag the window width down to the point where
the slider itself completely disappears. If you use the mouse wheel, this setting may be preferable because it
minimizes the use of screen space while still providing full functionality. You will see that the step size in
the parameter taken per click can be adjusted using the Step control at the right-hand end of the window.
For now, it is best to leave the slider window where the Tile windows command puts it, with its default
settings. To reset these, enter the original values (0) of CV[2] and CV[4] in the lens spreadsheet, then click
the slider-window tool in the main toolbar and close the slider-wheel setup spreadsheet immediately to
update the slider-wheel window (note that the settings for the analysis options are not changed).

SIDELINE #4

When Enable sw_callback CCL function is turned on, this routine is executed every time a graphic slider is
moved, or the mouse-wheel is rotated when the pointer is in the slider-wheel window. The arguments of
this function are cblevel, the value entered in the Level field in the slider-wheel spreadsheet; item, the type
of variable (CV = 1, TH = 3, etc.) that was changed, and srf, the number of the surface associated with that
variable. These arguments can be used to produce whatever action you want. In the present case, the
function only looks to see if cblevel is non-zero, and if it is, the function carries out that many design
iterations.

The default sw_callback routine is as follows.

Cmd Sw_callback(int cblevel, int item, int srf)
{
if (cblevel)
ite cblevel;
}