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.

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LolWolf a day ago | parent [-]

ah I see!

Yes this is very cool (hope you make it open source :) but have you taken a peek at the openflexure project? They make a fully motorized 3-axis microscope that is 3d printed and relatively inexpensive (parts+motors+electronics - PLA net out to USD 250?)

it’s very cool! maybe you can also take some ideas from there :)

https://openflexure.org/

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dekhn a day ago | parent [-]

I don't particularly like the openflexure approach. Instead, I build stages similar to standard XY stages: https://www.asiimaging.com/products/stages/xy-inverted-stage... which uses standard motion components (linear rail and linear bearings, 3d printer style steppers), all of which gets mounted on aluminum extrusion (4040). Then the illuminator and camera just get mounted on the aluminum extrusion.

It's pretty close to the Thorlabs Cerna, https://www.thorlabs.com/cerna-r-series-modular-microscopy-s... although I just do low-magnification light microscopy.

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LolWolf a day ago | parent [-]

I see, what’s the min step size you’re going for?

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dekhn a day ago | parent [-]

typically around one micron (which is about the same as one pixel with my objective and camera). I am not trying to take min steps. I'd rather have smooth motion, with fairly high accuracy.

The current system I am building is mainly optimized around scanning large areas quickly; I have already demonstrated that I can create accurate stitches by moving, stopping, taking photo, repeat, but it's slow (due to the stopping) so I am working on an approach that keeps the stage moving constantly, but triggers a bright flash that freezes intermediate exposures. This gives a good 10X speedup over the simpler model of move/stop/photo/repeat but brings in a number of other challenges.

	▲	LolWolf a day ago \| parent [-]
		ah very cool, I see! good luck! are you posting updates anywhere?