What is FRED?

FRED is an optical engineering software package designed to analyze optical systems including mechanical structures using non-sequential, sequential, and coherent raytracing. FRED's point-and-click graphical user interface (GUI) for building geometry and performing analysis is both powerful and intuitive. FRED can analyze a wide range of optical phenomena including straylight, scatter, illumination, imaging quality, coherent propagation, irradiance, intensity, polarization, and much more. FRED also has 3D graphics that provide immediate visualization of your optical system.

What's new in this release?

All of the latest features in FRED are documented both in the New Features and Development Release Notes documents. Both can be accessed by selecting Help from FRED's main menu.

How do you get started?

One of the fastest ways to learn FRED is to go through our tutorials.  We recommend that new users start with the overview articles FRED Introduction and Navigating the User Interface, and the detailed examples Single Lens Reflex Camera, Laser Illuminator, Lightpipe, and Building a Cassegrain Telescope Objective. Once you've gained some familiarity, there is a wide range of sample files that ship with every FRED installation. These files can be browsed by selecting Help, then Browse Sample Files, from FRED's main menu.

Online Help Status

Our Online Help is continually edited and updated. We recommend that you check the Release Notes and revisit Help on a regular basis, especially when you install a new release of FRED. If you are unable to find what you need here, please call or email us with any questions or issues. 

Additional Information

Though optical technology is discussed in general terms, this manual is not a primer in optical technology. You can find a helpful list of excellent books and papers on various optical topics in this Help system.

DISTRIBUTION TO THE U.S. GOVERNMENT

This FRED software (and supporting documentation) is commercial computer software developed exclusively at private expense. Use, duplication, and disclosure by civilian agencies of the U.S. Government shall be in accordance with FAR 52.227-19 (c) or other agency data rights provisions, as may be applicable. Use, duplication, and disclosure by DOD agencies is subject solely to the terms of standard software License Agreement as stated in DFARS 227.7202.

All rights reserved under the Copyright Laws of the United States.