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Did you see the article on SolidSmack in which Spire Starter client, Core, was featured? Check it out if you're interested in learning the fascinating lessons they garnered the hard way. They built a hand-held device -- with some lovely lit elements -- which trains people to meditate more effectively and regularly.  Engineering dry electrodes, the surprising difficulties of working with real wood in mass production and millimeter-level ergonomics design were all discussed. You can read the full article on SolidSmack here: https://www.solidsmack.com/engineering/behind-the-design-cores-wellness-device/ Or watch the video interviews here:
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 Spire Starter's Director of Optical Engineering, Erin McDermott, will be attending CES 2020 to cover tech news for SolidSmack.com. Have optics-related tech to show off at the show? Please get in touch! She'll be especially interested to check out your development.
Have a great show, everyone, and happy new year!  This was the view from one of the Denver Startup Week panels hosted by the WeWork office at the Wells Fargo Center in downtown Denver. Not too shabby! We're in beautiful Colorado for all of September 2019! So exciting to learn about the many emerging startups and tech happenings here.
Right now, we're finishing up at Denver Startup Week. Our schedule is filling up fast for free, in-person preliminary optical engineering consultations with companies in and around Denver for September 23rd - 27th . (Longmont, Greeley, Ft. Collins, Colorado Springs, Golden, Boulder, etc.) If your company is in this area and you'd like us to visit, drop us a line to catch us before we leave! Nichia just announced their new LED technology, the 2-in-1 tunable white LED. It will allow a range of color temperatures to be emitted from a single, small, LED package. Ok, but who cares? Optical engineers care! This development will allow us to design lighting in a more controlled way than ever before which can go from warm to cool-colored white light.  Nichia's announcement as it appeared on LinkedIn.com on September 19, 2019. We don’t see literature yet on what the range is exactly, but to imagine the concept, think of your dining room lit by a candle-light kind of warm white, and then making that bluer until it’s that clinical, white-room kind of white you could do lab work under. For the optical engineer (OE) to design this functionality into your lighting, we’d typically need to use at least 2 separate LEDs. The problem with that is it at least *doubles* the surface area of your fixture’s light source. OE’s need the *smallest emitting surface area possible* to get the most controlled light direction. Each groove in your reflector/lens/ film directing the light can only be aligned with 1 point on the LED - let’s say, the center point. Any ray NOT coming from the center, will ultimately not go precisely where you want it to. And the further from center, the farther from ideal that ray will fly, because physics. But if the LED gets smaller, the light beam coming out can be tighter with light going more closely to right where you want it. Plus, the size of your optics can potentially be smaller which means the size of your overall fixture could potentially be smaller. So, the smaller the light emitting surface, the more cool things OE’s can design! Way to go, Nichia.  We'll be in Seattle the last week of October to visit a few events and facilities and meet with people working on a HW projects involving optics. Spire Starter provides free preliminary optical engineering consultations to teach you what optical analysis and design can do for your specific project! Design, analysis, optimization, or system debugging if things all go wrong and you don't know where to turn: we can help with all of it! Erin M. McDermott will be on hand at the Seattle VR: Demos & Experiences MeetUp October 25, 2018 to cover the event and Seattle VR community for SolidSmack.com Here's the link to that MeetUp: https://www.meetup.com/Seattle-VR-Demos-Experiences/events/255189659/  Be sure to say, "hi!" if you're there!
We'll also be visiting The Facility Makerspace at Edmonds Community College for another SolidSmack article and video. If you won't be attending these events but still want to schedule a meeting with our optical engineers, get in touch via the CONTACT form on this site. We received a request a while back to add some pretty weighty terms to our online glossary: MTF and OTF. Aka: modulation transfer function and optical transfer function. After a lot of work trying to condense these definitions down into the most distilled, layman-friendly versions possible, we decided these guys needed their own articles, too! For the quick glossary definition, you can find them alphabetically at: http://www.spirestarter.com/education/glossary-of-optics-words For a longer, detailed explanation with pictures and a graph and everything (!) see this link: http://www.spirestarter.com/education/mtf-otf-explained The full article is still geared at someone with a beginner's understanding, not to worry. We worked hard at giving a thorough, but still easy-to-comprehend lesson with as little jargon as possible. If anything is still unclear, or if you have comments or questions, please let us know! Or if there's anything else you'd like defined for laymen, hit us up. These articles and the glossary are open for continual improvement. You help make them better! We just applied for the WomensNet Amber Grant! . . . because we strongly believe in playing every card you got . . . even if that card is simply being a woman-owned business. All the finger crossings you can lend would be greatly appreciated! We'll find out the beginning of next month if we won the $1,000 monthly prize and if we qualify for an additional $9,000 at the end of the year!  We were thrilled when Dragon Innovation asked to add us as their optical engineering resource!  Boom. Dragon Innovation helps companies bring their hardware ideas successfully through to manufacturing. That road is paved with landmines and Dragon Innovation uses an experienced network of manufacturing Sherpas to safely guide the way. Spire Starter is proud to be one of those resources! If you're working with Dragon Innovation -- or even if you're not -- and have an optical component in your hardware system you'd like reviewed, drop us a line. Our initial consultations give us an in-depth understanding of your specific problem. We then can reveal potential paths forward and ballpark costs for those solutions. Plus, initial consultations are totally free with no obligation! We look forward to working with Dragon Innovation clients and all the other HW dreamers who need an optics leg-up. We're applying to the 2018 WeWork Creator Awards! WeWork is looking to support creators of all types -- including those using novel business models to pursue "careers with intention". Spire Starter serves as a business framework to allow optical engineers to do just that. Plus, we bring difficult-to-acquire optics expertise to those carving a path in a different sense: to the companies taking HW development to new levels. The region Spire Starter belongs to will be having its awards show in Nashville, TN on September 13, 2018. We're entering the "Business Venture" category with the possibility to take home between $130k-$360k! That would go a long way to fund promotional travel. It would allow us to own even more fun tools to do our work, too! While we have no way of knowing how far we'll get in the process, the application itself already proved rewarding. It's difficult to concisely describe what optical engineering is to laymen and how Spire Starter works, but we had to do just that -- and within 90 seconds. Check out the video below to see examples of the types of systems we work on and a brief description of how we work. Hope to see you in Nashville in September! |
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Photo used under Creative Commons from soomness
