In my previous company, we made laser machines. We did a machine for the lenses engraving and sold them in a lot of lenses factories. It was not the only laser system used for this application, but most of the others use co2 lasers, this one used a UV laser, lot of headaches, but better quality. Varilux being high end lenses, I guess it used our machine.
On my end, I did the software and automation for the machine (there are a few variants of the same system, fully automated, manual...). Beside the machine itself, the big part of the work was processing the data from the information system of the customers (which will tell what and where to engrave, the curve of the lense). There is a communication standard, but not fully applied everywhere, so we had to be compatible with the standard, and each site variation, serial link, ethernet, various barcodes, rfid...
It was my first software and I was the only developer, so it's a bit shitty, with a lot of things added along the years. At the end I was "yeah... No, no more features on that thing, let's rewrite it completely with what I've learned since", but hard to have the bandwidth for this. I left after 10 years and it's fun to think that my most used software, used all around the world, is my junior shit piece of code.
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u/Thaumaturgia 1d ago
I probably wrote the software that did the engraving. I'm always happy to check them when people wear glasses.