Updates
Well, I realize it’s been a while since I’ve posted any updates, so I thought I’d make a quick post to bring everyone up to speed. At this point, we have a piece of acrylic with a 0.5 - 1mm-thick layer of dilluted Lexel on top. It actually came out pretty clear. We also put the Rosco grey on top of this, and then tested it out. We definitely saw a really, really good FTIR effect. The only problem is that it’s a long way away from zero-force.
In light of this, we’re continuing to tweak our FTIR setup, but we’re also going to be experimenting with a DI setup. It’s the same principle of tracking reflected IR light as blobs, only instead of pressing down to create the effect, you shine IR light up through the glass and look for reflections off of the objects themselves. This means that not only can the table be zero-force, it can actually detect objects slightly above the table as well. Neat. We should also be able to track fiducials on the bottoms of objects with this setup, which could hold some neat possibilities in and of itself.
Here’s hoping at least one of these two methods is going to work out for us!