An article earlier touched on whether to patent or not. The conclusion for HiLO Lens was to go ahead and patent.
To help keep the filing cost low I spent quite some time on the description. So our lawyer had a lot less work to do. We also did the drawings ourselves. This is easy because we have 3D software models of HiLO Lens.
Perhaps more importantly, we shopped around to find a patent lawyer who was willing to minimize our up front costs. This meant a little more work for me, but saved several thousand dollars.
HiLO Lens combines mechanical innovations, optical innovations and software innovations. So it is relatively complex to patent. We also run into the ugly question of software patents. We did not attempt to obtain a pure software patent, to begin with there are few jurisdictions that allow this. Instead we focused on the simplifications of the optics and mechanics that are possible when the software is integrated into the system. In our case the software is an embedded software, with a direct impact on the design of HiLO Lens. We decided that incorporating the behavior of the software was wisest.