Simple Camera Fiber Optic interface (Hardware)

I wanted to build a simple interface for viewing the light coming through a fiber cable. This project is part of a larger project involving modifying a spectrophotometer which is a work in progress. But this post is just about designing and building a custom rig for grabbing the light from fiber. Now I'm only interested at the moment in the visible spectrum so this didn't have to really complicated. I essentially wanted to use an off the shelf webcam to view the light. Luckily a company I worked for years ago gave me some webcams so this part was easy.

I ended up using a Genius 120 degree webcam because it was the easiest to build case around and the focus method was very well built. Choosing this webcam really wasn't a great idea in the end because turns out its a pretty expensive webcam with a new one coming to about $150 and used being about $50. Which meant if I broke something I pretty much had to design a new case but ohh well. Either way the webcam fit well into the case that I designed in Sketchup

I built a wire holder into the case and even went ahead and filled the hole with epoxy because I'm not really a big fan of self destructive projects.

The lid ended up being an odd shape because I started trimming down on where the plastic needed to be and these trimmings also cut like 2 hours off the print time. 

The main area where the fiber optic cable inserted had to about 11 mm thick to get the end of the fiber directly above the lens. 

On the inside of the lid I did add small area above the lens because the lens extended above the case by about .5mm. Not a big deal I just wanted to be safe. 

At this point of the build I hadn't realized that centering the two bolts was a bad idea (dumb mistake). Obviously when the two bolts are inserted the box won't be able to sit on a table evenly. It will constantly rock back and forth. I should have made it 4 bolts and put one on each corner or another option would could have been designing the lid to insert into the box. My solution to this problem was to print an attachment for the bottom adding legs to the design. I grabbed my cheap desktop laser and cut out some soft feet.

The next part of this project is to write some code to take the data from the webcam and pinpoint it to a specific wavelength but that's still a work in progress.  Here is a video of the output from the camera Fiber optic line

Thanks for reading 

UPDATE AUGUST 14

Still working on the software but also had redesign the lid. The orginal version required you too slightly modify the optical cable which just seemed like the wrong direction if your 3D printing the project.  I also wanted to give the camera a little more clearing room under the lid so I expanded the the design upward by about 2mm.

Decided to go ahead and remove the IR filter on the camera. At first it seemed a little to risky but the idea of being able to see a little more of the spectrum really pushed me over the edge. My biggest worry was scratching some of the lower layers but didn't seem to be an issue.  I do think a might have lost some of the  focus but I think it was worth it.