Custom Illumination Simulator

As part of designing a new sensor for monitoring cargo in 53’ trailers, I was tasked with optimizing the LED configuration to best cover the entirety of the trailer. Hardware constraints meant this optimization would have to happen almost entirely in simulation; and unfortunately there weren’t any simulators out there that quite met our needs. So I built my own.

The foundation of the simulator were emitter power distributions like the one below that we were able to capture thanks to my previous work on an automated testing range.

After that, I accounted for a number of other factors based on a combination of first principles and experimental results. These effects included:

• Distance fall-off curves

• Angle of incidence

• Material properties

• Lens gain

While I created the simulator to handle the complicated geometries of our new, specialized sensor, it was also able to simulate the simple geometries of our general-purpose sensor. This meant that I could validate the simulator against real data from the field and ultimately move forward with confidence in the simulation results. The end result was a tool that I could use to rapidly iterate through varied combinations of lenses and orientations.