Abstract: A lighting system is disclosed comprising an excitor which drives at least one reactor. The excitor is an electrical waveform generator that creates an AC waveform at a frequency between about 50 kHz and about 100 MHz. The reactor is an under-damped resonant circuit that includes a network of lighting elements. Reactive components are distributed among the lighting elements. These reactive components can regulate the current and voltage to individual lighting elements. The drive system is particularly useful for arrays of low-voltage lighting elements such as LEDs. It is fault tolerant in that the failure of individual elements need not affect the operation of remaining elements, and elements can be added and removed without affecting the serviceability of other elements.

Abstract: A lighting system is disclosed comprising an excitor which drives at least one reactor. The excitor is an electrical waveform generator that creates an AC waveform at a frequency between about 50 kHz and about 100 MHz. The reactor is an under-damped resonant circuit that includes a network of lighting elements. Reactive components are distributed among the lighting elements. These reactive components can regulate the current and voltage to individual lighting elements. The drive system is particularly useful for arrays of low-voltage lighting elements such as LEDs. It is fault tolerant in that the failure of individual elements need not affect the operation of remaining elements, and elements can be added and removed without affecting the serviceability of other elements.

Abstract: A system for inspecting ophthalmic lenses and including transport, illumination, imaging and image processing subsystems. The transport system moves a multitude of ophthalmic lenses along a predetermined path to move each of those lenses, one at a time, into a lens inspection position, and the illumination subsystem generates a series of light pulses and directs a respective one light pulse through each ophthalmic lens. The imaging subsystem generates a set of signals representing selected portions of the light pulses transmitted through the ophthalmic lenses, and the image processing subsystem receives those signals from the imaging subsystem and processes those signals according to a predetermined program to identify at least one condition of each of the lenses.

Abstract: A system for inspecting ophthalmic lenses and including transport, illumination, imaging and image processing subsystems. The transport system moves a multitude of ophthalmic lenses along a predetermined path to move each of those lenses, one at a time, into a lens inspection position, and the illumination subsystem generates a series of light pulses and directs a respective one light pulse through each ophthalmic lens. The imaging subsystem generates a set of signals representing selected portions of the light pulses transmitted through the ophthalmic lenses, and the image processing subsystem receives those signals from the imaging subsystem and processes those signals according to a predetermined program to identify at least one condition of each of the lenses.

Abstract: A system for inspecting ophthalmic lenses and including transport, illumination, imaging and image processing subsystems. The transport system moves a multitude of ophthalmic lenses along a predetermined path to move each of those lenses, one at a time, into a lens inspection position, and the illumination subsystem generates a series of light pulses and directs a respective one light pulse through each ophthalmic lens. The imaging subsystem generates a set of signals representing selected portions of the light pulses transmitted through the ophthalmic lenses, and the image processing subsystem receives those signals from the imaging subsystem and processes those signals according to a predetermined program to identify at least one condition of each of the lenses.

Abstract: A method and system for automatically inspecting an ophthalmic lens. The method includes the steps of directing a light beam through the lens and onto an array of pixels, and assigning to each pixel a data value representing the intensity of the light beam on the pixel. The data values are then processed according to a predetermined program to determine if the lens contains any one of a group of predetermined conditions.