Question: Other than buying optics, what is your most recent project?

Ian Sandal answered on 11 Mar 2015:

Buying optics is part of many projects I work on and not a project itself. We need special lenses and mirrors for lots of the work.

One recent project I have worked on is looking to use a laser to measure sugar levels in your blood. The idea is to use very small lasers and components to measure how much sugar is in your blood, this would be useful to track the sugar levels in diabetics. If we can make them small enough and cheap enough the idea is they could be incorporated into a watch or bracket so you can always keep an eye on them and not need to go to the doctors for tests.

A second project is to make thermal cameras, these would work like the cameras in mobile phones, but instead of seeing light they would see heat. This would work as any hot object emits light (thats why the sun is yellow), as an object gets colder this light is emitted as infrared light. I am designing special cameras to measure infrared light. These could then be used by the military to see things at night (night vision) or doctors to investigate cancer.