You know what your product needs the lens to do. SpecBuildr asks a short set of plain-English questions and turns your answers into a complete optical specification a lens manufacturer can actually quote and build from.
If optics isn't your field, the hard part isn't the design — it's knowing what to even specify. A machine shop will happily quote a bracket from a sketch. An optics vendor needs numbers most engineers have never had to name.
Send a vague request and you get one of two things back: a long list of clarifying questions, or a quote with so much margin baked in for the unknowns that it's useless. SpecBuildr closes that gap. It asks you the questions a good optical engineer would ask — in language you already understand — and translates your answers into the terms the shop expects.
Specifying a custom lens comes down to six things a manufacturer needs to see. Here's what each one means in plain terms — you don't need to arrive knowing them, the interview draws them out of what you already know.
How strongly the lens bends light, and how much light it collects (the f-number).
In plain terms: how far away things focus, and how bright the image is.
The color or spectrum it must work at — visible, near-IR, a specific laser line.
In plain terms: what light is actually passing through it.
The glass or polymer type and any anti-reflection or protective coating.
In plain terms: what it's made of and how much light it wastes.
Physical diameter, how it seats in your assembly, and how tight it has to be.
In plain terms: will it fit, and how fussy is it to make.
How sharp it needs to be (resolution / spot size) over the field you care about.
In plain terms: good enough for a sensor, or good enough for the eye.
Temperature, shock, moisture — and whether it's one prototype or ten thousand parts.
In plain terms: where it lives and how many you need.
You answer questions about your application in plain language, and the tool converts them into the parameters a lens shop needs — focal length, aperture, wavelength, material and coating, size and tolerances, and an image-quality target. It's written for competent engineers who aren't optics specialists: it asks about your product, not about ray-transfer matrices, and explains any term it introduces.
A complete, downloadable lens specification: focal length and aperture, wavelength band, material and coating guidance, size and mounting, an image-quality target, and environmental and volume notes — formatted so an optics vendor can quote it directly.
It's generated from your answers and reviewed for major physics and manufacturability violations — it won't hand you something optically impossible. Treat it as a strong, vendor-ready starting point, not a substitute for a final review by whoever builds it.
The tool is free to use and needs no account. You keep the spec.
Five minutes of plain questions. A build-ready specification at the end.
Start your lens spec →