TCEL series by Opto Engineering® features a perfect combination of telecentric optics and liquid lenses technology allowing to significantly increase the depth of field (DOF). This is particularly important for small fields of view due to the proportionality of the DOF with the magnification. Thanks to their optical design, TCEL lenses ensure excellent optical performances both in terms of telecentricity and especially distortion throughout the entire operating range. This makes them a perfect choice for many inspection and measurement applications spanning from electronic and semicon segments to the automotive one, from pharmaceutical to fasteners. The electronically controlled liquid lenses enable to precisely tune the optical power of telecentric lenses adjusting the focus: this adjustment can be extremely fast with response times in the order of few milliseconds. The driver comes as a compact USB-powered current source with free software and can be used as a stand-alone solution or integrated into OEM designs. Communication follows an open simple serial protocol, which can be implemented in any programming language on Windows or Linux (C#, Labview and Python source code available).
Instead of using a bigger lens (left) and a higher resolution camera to compensate, with TCEL series (right) it is possible to extend the DOF of a lens that is properly dimensioned for the sample.
Both the driving current and the magnification are linearly proportional to the working distance, allowing the system to be calibrated to compensate for the inevitable variations in magnification due to the liquid lens (by way of example, the graphs relating to the TCEL23036 lens are shown).