I’ll continue the discussion with @adrianMolecule here, from the idea posted on the thread for the Experiment funding.
Although i really appreciate all the work and innovative designs of the openflexure project, we have to keep in mind that at the very core of the openflexure is digially controlled and precise automation of a microscopy stage, it’s not about building a low-cost microscope. And in the real world only very few applications need automation…
On the optics side and the ccd camera chip, the same applies to every design of a DIY microscope.
For keeping the costs down, we can even skip the raspi, thus switching to an ESP32, and use already owned smart phones as display for the microscopy image streamed via wifi. Recorded images can be stored in higher resolution on an SD card and later retreived through a website.
I personally never use stage automation, and i am happy to move around my samples by hand to find stuff to look at. also z-focus can be easily done by a simple mechanism, as with every standard microscope, just turning a wheel.
although i would be interested in using some inventions from the flexure for purely automated z-focus. leaving the x-y out of the game.