A First Look at BeamWise In Operation

Dr. Giacomo Vacca of Kinetic River will present a briefing on BeamWise™ at the Twenty-Third Cytometry Development Workshop in Asilomar today. Here is a silent four minute video of some key aspects of BeamWise operation he will narrate live as a part of the briefing. Tapio Karras of Design Parametrics will also be on hand to answer questions. The video was created from a screen capture of BeamWise in operation by Hannu Lehtimäki.

A couple of key points

• The beams are a key organizing principle for the flow cytometry system.
• Specifying the beam relationships and distances for each vector between optical elements (e.g. light source (laser), filters, lens, mirrors, prisms, etc..) allow the designer to restrict the changes to those that are relevant to the optical design.

The video starts with a whiteboard sketch of a system that’s then entered into a simple table that specifies key relationships and distances. A 3 dimensional mechanical model is generated based on mechanical dimension data supplied by the manufacturer’s web site for each component., a dimensioned assembly drawing and a bill of materials are also automatically generated.

In a second pass the designer selects a vector between two optical elements and changes it’s length, all of the down stream elements are updated to maintain the distances in the vector specification table. He then changes the direction and related layout for another vector and all the downstream locations are adjusted appropriately. A revised assembly is then generated (the bill of materials is also re-generated but is not affected by the two changes).

Dr. Vacca will also show a scale model mockup of the original assembly that has been 3D printed with the assistance of Paul Spaan of Spaan Enterprises. The video is based on working software and is intended to give designers a sense of the speed of iteration about  configuration options, essentially design space exploration. A prototype instrument might have the base and fixtures 3D printed for speed and accuracy of assembly.