The latest version of FRED, v11.40, was officially released on April 4th and is now available for download. Last week, Photon Engineering hosted a webinar discussing new features which have been added to FRED over the past few releases. Additionally, a sneak peak at some development items was given. If you were unable to attend one of the webinar sessions, please feel free to watch the webinar recording below. The chart slides are also provided in the attached PDF. Optomechanical Design and Analysis STEP and IGES files can be imported and exported for integration of mechanical and optical designs. FRED can import and export system models as IGES or STEP files for full integration of mechanics and optics. Once imported, the NURB representations are treated as any other node in the FRED document and can be assigned optical properties for accurate raytracing. Assigning properties to a collection of NURB surfaces, whether it is a material, coating, scatter or raytrace control, is easily accomplished by drag and drop from FRED’s object tree. This type of interactive graphical interface means that integrating components and constructing system models is fast, efficient and easy to learn! Having a virtual prototyping tool such as FRED that can be used to identify potential design issues can save on both development costs and time to market. Stray Light Analysis Stray light analyses with FRED showing actual and simulated images of the Apache Point 3.5m telescope (Top), ghost reflections in the MOBIE instrument of the Thirty Meter Telescope (Bottom Left), and a polychromatic ghost image in an imaging camera (Bottom Right) FRED is the proven optomechanical analysis package for performing accurate stray light calculations and provides engineers with a complete toolbox of stray light utilities. Full system specification can be accomplished by using the 13+ surface and volume scatter models, 18 material definition types (including real and imaginary refractive index values) and 7 coating types. These physical properties can be applied to any geometrical object in the model to produce realistic simulations of light interaction. FRED’s visual interface allows instant model feedback such as scatter model parametrization verification through 2D or 3D angle and B-B0 plots and total integrated scatter (TIS) calculations. After a raytrace FRED can compile a list of scatter and ghost paths from source to a specified detector, and these paths can be re-drawn to the 3D view for visualization. Additionally, these raytrace paths can be interrogated using any of FRED’s built in or user-customized analysis routines by simple application of ray path filters. An effective optical design and analysis program must not only have the proper tools available, the user must be able to accurately and confidently use those tools in practice. FRED’s combination of usability and accuracy make it the industry standard for stray light analysis. For more information on stray light analysis in FRED, please read the following application notes and papers: