Hi all!!
We managed to use the Delta Stage to replace a Thorlabs 3-axis translation stage was used to couple an optical fibre into a photonics chip with great success! We also further characterised the Delta Stage itself for drift over 24 hours, thermal drift, effects of motors and a few other things before we could use it for optical coupling!
We’ve written it up for our Master’s thesis and we would love to share our paper if there is a platform on here to do so!
We’re currently working on improving the Delta Stage to try to implenent pitch,yaw and roll motion to using a flexure mechanism so we have a flexure stage with 6 deg of freedom but that is still a work in progress!
Thanks for all the help!
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You should be able to attach a PDF in a post, or post a link if you have it online elsewhere. It would be very interesting to have your characterisation available. Do make sure that your institution does not place any restriction on you publishing material submitted for assessment, especially before assessment is complete.
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Very nice! Do please share the report when you are able. If you can’t upload it here, feel free to upload it to contact@openflexure.org and we’ll figure out something else. Perhaps you could deposit it on e.g. Zenodo, and post a DOI instead? I’d love to have a collection of student project reports/theses that I can link to from our publications page.
Incidentally, did you consider the block stage for this? That’s roughly what it’s designed for, but it’s not had a huge amount of use outside our lab yet.
We did consider the block stage but given that the Delta stage would already meet the precision requirements and already had a way to mount an objective lens with the CAD file available, we decided to stick with it.
Makes sense! There is (or at least was) an objective lens mount for the block stage, but it might be buried in an “extras” folder or similar. My gut feeling is that the block stage should be more stable - but I’ve not actually done a comparative test.