FRED Development Download

To download the latest development version of FRED, 24.10.0, please select the option below.  Note that ALL licenses are eligible to run the 64-bit version of FRED.  An email will be automatically sent to you with the download information. If for some reason, you do not find the email in your inbox, please check your spam filter or bulk email folder.

Important Notice Regarding Developmental Test Releases

Photon Engineering makes developmental test versions of the FRED Optical Engineering Software available to users on an occasional basis. Users under a current annual support contract can have early access to the newest features and the latest bug fixes. In return, we ask for your feedback regarding the new feature implementations and any potential bugs.

As with any software product under development, please be aware of the following:

• It is important to consider the issue of FRED file version compatibility. FRED model files are fully backward compatible, but they are not forward compatible. For example, FRED files created with earlier versions can be read by FRED version 23.10, but files created by version 23.10 can not be read by prior releases.

• This development version release falls under Photon Engineering’s FRED End User License Agreement section 4,” Limited Warranty”.

• Before downloading you should verify that your current software authorization codes will allow you to run the development version.  To do this, launch your current version of FRED and go to Menu > Help > License Authorization.  If the version limit reported in the License Authorization dialog matches or exceeds the development version number you want to download, then you will be able to run the development version.

Note: You may observe that after downloading and running the FRED installer, Windows presents the following dialog.  If you see this warning:

1. If your version shows an option to display “More info”, please click on that link.  You will then be presented with an option to run the installer file.

2. If your version of this dialog does not show an option to display “More info”, please take the following steps:

   1. Right mouse click on the FRED installation executable and choose “Properties”.

   2. On the General tab of the resulting dialog, look for an option in the lower right that says “Unblock”.  Toggle this option.

   3. Close the properties dialog and then run the FRED installer executable again.

Release Notes are included with your FRED installation and can be found by navigating to Help > Release Notes from the menu.

New Items in this Development Release

The following new items and bug fixes are included in this developmental release version:

New Charting

 The new charting was launched in preview mode in the prior release, but has since been extended to fill in functional gaps to the legacy charts, and as a result is now considered complete.

 The charting in FRED has been modernized to a newer charting technology (LightningChart) with the aim of making charting analyses faster, more responsive, more feature rich and thereby improve overall useability.

 Notable usability enhancements include:

• Simple controls in a new Chart Navigator pop-out to set custom max/min chart scaling and increase / decrease text font sizes

• The ability to create Analysis Result Nodes (ARNs) directly from existing charts

• Dynamic rescaling of axes in the charts (via click and drag on the axes)

• The addition of a text “Info window” pop-out that features pertinent information to the chart such as total power and ray counts to avoid having to refer scroll back through the output window

• An optional “Dark Mode” setting

 Note that it is possible to revert to the legacy charting at any time by deselecting the “Use LightningChart” option in Tools... Preferences... Charting, then restarting FRED.

 General Updates

• Support has been added for surface retro-reflection and phase conjugation. These new options are available in the modifiers tab of the surface.

• The Jones matrix coating definition now supports “3D Polarization”. Unlike the prior algorithm which generated correct results only in the case of normal incidence, the new method supports skew rays.

• Ray selection filters in FRED have been substantially improved to make working with filters easier:

  • The addition of a comparator argument has allowed a significant reduction in the number of filters presented in the list without reducing functionality.

  • Ray filters now also support parentheses to make it more comfortable to define complex ray selection filters grouped with AND/OR conditions

  • New r-click menu items provide the ability to save and load ray filters, as well as create the scripting language equivalent of a given filter operation (row) or entire filter condition to copy into a script.

• A new ray selection filter for Angle of Incidence / Exitance has been added.

• The single ray trace dialog has been improved to be much more responsive when using a source with a large number of rays

• ·Color Correlated Temperature (CCT) has been added to the Color Image output and scripting language

• MPC (GPU) traces now print a summary at trace end in a similar manner to CPU traces which lists the number of rays traced and how many rays were terminated for exceeding ray trace control limits.

• A number of out of box preferences have been updated to make new installations of FRED nicer to work with and allow FRED to use more hardware resources without further user intervention.

• Added full Unicode text support to allow non-English characters to be presented. This improvement will allow FRED to be translated into other languages.

Miscellaneous Updates and Bug Fixes 

In addition to the improvements described above, this release contains several smaller features and bug fixes.  Please refer to the Release Notes found on the Help menu inside of FRED for a complete listing of all enhancements and defect resolutions.