In article , "N Cook" wrote:
I had a go today but failed , any ideas? A violinist, I know, asked about
such an inspection viewer, small and flexible.
My attempt started with a clump of plastic optical fibres from one of those
lamps with a rotating colour wheel and epoxyied into a lump on the lamp end.
And a dome cut from the top of a clear lens LED. Both ground down , finer
grit, until toothpaste on paper. LED , as a fish-eye lens, sort of focused
the sun at about 5mm so focal length 5mm. Tried fixing lens 5mm and then
10mm from the ground fibres surface and blanked off remaining area.
The other free ends of the fibres grouped as they came so not fully 1:1
mapping but no change of image viewing when moving over a black and white
grid. Any ideas , or a total waste of time. The fibres are coarse 10 thou
diameter , but just giving it a go.


I was doing some work here with fibers. I was going to make some couplers for
LEDs. Still in the works. I got something like 50 feet of bundled fibers. They
were just floating so i could do anything i wanted. By epoxying the ends, then finely polishing
the ends, I could get good light transfer, but far from optimum. The process needs
tweaked by be. I also had an assembly made, and the polishing is so much better
than by me. These assemblies have the fibers in not perfect order I'm sure it takes special
layout to be able to keep an image intact. First you need good terminated ends, good lens
conversion, then, good continuity.

greg