Abstract

About five years ago I began working on wear programs for use with calculators sufficiently inexpensive that they could be accounted as tooling and set up for small shop use. As recently as the 1980 OSA Spring Conference I was publishing techniques for programmable hand calculators as most suitable under these restrictions. In the short interval since, the small personal computer has come of age and become big business. Today there are small units at least a thousand times faster than the hand calculator and usually with at least CRT graphics capability sufficiently inexpensive for this application. They are interactive and have sufficient memory and flexibility to give almost immediately answers that were previously unasked because of the time involved. These new machines have obvious uses in the managerial area where computers have been used for some time in larger companies. An example of this is the statistical quality assurance program discussed at this meeting. However, their low cost and flexibility now brings them to a new group of users, the opticians themselves, giving them tools that were once only in the province of engineers. Another paper at this meeting brings this point home with a listing of a broad variety of problems, most of them simple, but of daily concern in the shop. These could all be stored on a single tape to be called up as needed. This paper will exemplify a more complex problem, but one as simply handled, the planning of an aspheric figuring process. Since the calculations are treated .in the literature, it will concentrate on the flow logic, a simplified block diagram necessary to make these practically available on a routine basis to an optician on the shop floor. Since these people are seldom trained in computer usage, the interactive sequence must be simple. It is reduced to the following. At each decision point, the computer asks a simple question so phrased that it may be answered by a simple yes or no, by typing Y or N on the teletype. Once this decision has been made, the computer can request the data necessary in a rather specific form such as "type in the clear aperture in millimeters." Where the question needs further explanation, this can be provided by graphics. For example, as the optician specifies zones to be worked, pad sizes etc., each can be plotted on a CRT screen with the next range of options superimposed so that he can see what he must next choose.

© 1982 Optical Society of America