Hi Everyone
It has been a busy year in the OpenFlexure project. It has been about a year since we announced the new microscope software. I thought it might be nice to give an update.
We have a forum!
After some good press our Gitter chat ended up so busy we finally set up a forum last week! We have already found that it has improved community engagement.
Releases
We have released version 6 of the microscope, and version 2 of the microscope software.
There has also been progress towards v0.4 of @valerian’s motor board for the microscope. The new Sangaboard will have the option to be a pi-hat, we also added a way to hack your own sangaboard, and released python software for using the motor board.
We also documented the OpenFlexure block stage, used for fine translation.
Papers
We also published 3 Open Access papers on:
We also have a pre-print about co-designing hardware in the UK and Tanzania
Renderings
@jc2450 has also got into doing some crazy nice renderings:
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Hi Julian, this is so exciting!
I worked on some of the early prototypes for the Public Lab Community Microscope kit and spent a good deal of time looking at Open Flexure documentation at the time.
Looking at your April 2020 article on color correction, I was wondering if you’d be interested in cross-posting a link on Public Lab as a research note? (I can also put up a note and link back here if that’s easier) I think folks over there would be super interested in these updates and it’s also just a really helpful breakdown for understanding how the pi sensor works.
This all looks pretty amazing, excited to follow along on the forums!
I’ll put something up on Public lab in the next couple of days, I want to find a couple of nice example before and after images.
wonderful work!
In our project, The microscope was to be used in a project for Malaria(?) or something similar.
The design for the Microscope is written in OpenSCAD.
At the time I did try using the OpenSCAD workbench on his scad/csg files.
The design uses the OpenSCAD hull operation and maybe also Minkowski so is not natural for the OpenSCAD importer. I must have got somewhere as I have a saved FreeCAD file dated Feb 2020 see screenshot. Most of the SCAD files are dated Feb 2020.
If I try and open the main_body.scad file now/today I get an error with a scale operation, probably a bug with importCSG that is fixable and I must have got round this back in Feb 2020.
I only see STL files on the website so I don’t know if they are amenable to making the SCAD files available.
It is Open Hardware so must be worth an ask.
Every SCAD file is here:
Our assembly instructions only link to the STLs as these are needed for production. We do want to have better liking in the instructions between STLs and the source, but exactly how to do this in a maintainable way we have not worked out.
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