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.

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[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.

I haven't read the post yet because my work blocks access to the domain.

I agree there is a huge middle ground- for example, I make hobby microscopes at home, and much of my work has been making accurate and precise 2D/3D stages. It's easy to buy great, simple (non-motorized) scopes with good optical quality, but as soon as you start adding motorized stages, or any sort of complicated illumination or filtering, it gets challenging quickly. My actual goal is to track microbes in real time using computer vision, but the professional hardware to do so is out of my price range.

I have spent literally thousands of hours fiddling with one part or another Today, I'm working on a high speed flash illuminator that is coupled to the camera, and it's one problem after another. Reality has a fractal level of detail.

Since I haven't been able to look at your project yet, I don't know if you worked on this area, but I found it really useful to clone the Thorlabs cage system components: https://www.thorlabs.com/optical-cage-systems and specifically https://www.thorlabs.com/item/CXY2A (you can download their 3D model and see that the mechanism isn't that complex).

Another thing I've ended up doing is prototyping in plastic and then having it machined at a place like JLCPCB out of aluminum. PLA is just flexible enough (especially under load) that it can make the results very frustrating.