OpenFlexure Update

General
#1

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:

image
image1800×761 218 KB

image
image1138×768 168 KB
image
image1023×578 44.9 KB

2 Likes
#2

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!

#3

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.