alt Hacker NewsWith products from a vendor like Thor Labs, you're getting a lot of quality and knowledge built into the system. Mechanical engineers, electrical engineers, optical engineers... all of which means an edu kit like that will train a student to be useful in most grad research labs (which often build their systems out of thor labs components).
It sort of depends on what your goal is; personally, I live to see something expensive on Thorlabs, and make a simplified, less accurate, and far cheaper alternative in my home lab. But that's rarely how folks in labs do it- instead, they will focus on getting people to be useful for performing state of the art research, which usually depends on applying hundreds of years of experience to make some tiny marginal improvement, which frequently depends on having extremely precise and accurate gear.
Replies
As a student at a top worldwide university, I can tell you we order a lot more stuff off Amazon and eBay than you'd think. There's an awkward middle ground where you either buy something cheap or make it yourself because labour is basically free in academia thanks to the large amount of students and staff but grant money is not.
In some cases, you'll learn more from crappy hardware than you will from lab-grade gear. This is probably one of those cases. This build will require thoughtful attention and debugging/optimization on the student's part in ways that the Thor Labs kit might not.
I mean, it's practically the most basic optical experiment that you can perform. Nobody needs to pay $3K to learn how an interferometer works. It's not a MoT or something exotic like that, it's a beam splitter and a couple of mirrors.
Put another way, it's the difference between building a Heathkit and putting a bunch of parts together that you salvaged from other stuff, for those who are old enough to grasp that analogy.
Hopefully you enjoyed the post then!
I think there's just such a huge middle ground that's missing (for funny historical reasons[1]) between "children's toy" and "lab-grade equipment" especially in optics, which is why I was excited to make this my first foray into making a fully 3d printed "useful-ish" thing that doesn't really exist otherwise.
---
[1] This is because most lab equipment was made _in the lab_ back in the 60s or so, and having this technical ability was a huge advantage for many labs. Now, personnel cost/hours are much more expensive relative to equipment, so people will pretty much pay whatever to get lab-grade stuff.