Asahi Spectra Light Source
Today we have another Xenon light source, but this time we’re looking at a unit designed for scientific (or perhaps industrial process) applications. This device is from the 2010 and looks to be a far more modern design. I suspect this light source costs ~$5000 USD new. And given I only use my Xenon light sources occasionally, I wouldn’t normally buy anything so expensive. But I managed to pick this unit up to $1 on a local auction site.
Unfortunately I’m not going to be completely tearing this down as I use it on a regular basis. But I at least wanted to show the ND filter for comparison with the Wolf endoscopy unit:
Rather than using a metal disc with hole in it, this unit a glass disc which is coated with a variable density metal coating. This is a much more modern, typical method of creating an ND filter.
I’ve seen a similar approach used elsewhere, including this used ND filter block I picked up on eBay. You can see the metallisation much more clearly here:
There’s not much else to look at, poking around I could just about see a small control PCB with surface mount parts. No doubt this uses some local Renesas or Hitachi MCU I’ve never heard of.
The only other visible part of note is the handle on the lamp fixture, which is beautifully machined, massively over-engineered and feels extremely satisfying to use:
The output doesn’t use the same fiber connector as the Wolf unit. My device came with a couple of fiber adapters, and I was able to 3D a simple coupler which lets me use the cheap endoscopy fibers from eBay.
This particular Asahi light source appears to be OEM (hence the plane metal finish). But similar source are currently available. Some of these include selective wavelength output (i.e. they include a output filter):
The whole thing is pretty satisfying to use, and I’ll be keeping an eye our for used Asahi Spectra stuff in the future!
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