Tim, thanks for putting this together. Hopefully I'll get motivated once again and give this another shot. I tried a couple years ago but failed (or actually gave up). I have all of the newer designed 3D printed parts now and just need the other non-printed components. One of my hobbies is Microscopy and I've been wanting to get one of these up and running to experiment with for a long time now. Thanks again.
very bad resolution because the optics, the illuminationsystem and the camera are bad. Mooving the object and the camera is ok. but the motors should be connected to second hand microscop of 1980. That give good an cheaper images
I don't have access to a solder, so I found a pre-wired LED on Amazon. Do you think it would be bright enough? Here are the specs: Working range: 4-6V, 20mA. Luminance: 13,000-16,000MCD. Wire length: 15cm (I plan to add a female-female wire to reach the desired 20cm, and also because the product looks like it has a male head). I'm not confident in my physics knowledge, but here's my attempt. The LED recommended by OpenFlexure cites a luminance of 22,000MCD at 3.2V. If the current is 20mA, the LED's internal resistance is 160ohms. Hooking the LED up to a 5V battery and a 60ohm resistor seems to effectively supply the LED with 3.64V. This increases the power by a factor of 1.3. Assuming the luminance is proportional to power, the luminance would also increase by a factor of 1.3, resulting in an effective luminance of 29,000MCD. If this is the luminance that the OpenFlexure build expects, the Amazon LED seems a little weak.
Can you still manually move the stage in X/Y/Z while the motors are attached by turning the gears with your fingers? How about just moving the slide itself across the stage? How useful do you think the motors are? Do the motors make it tedious to skim through a sample (are they slow)?
The microscope looks quite good but the software is a terrible bodge job and what's with the Raspberry Pi AND Arduino? ..... seems kinda excessive considering the Pi has GPIO of it's own????????
Even with the RT kernel, the Pi does not do motor control very well while also doing other things. It makes more sense to use an Arduino with a hard realtime gcode interpreter that has been tested for a long time.
