That's a fair criticism of the website and one that we had been meaning to address for a while now. We did start collecting pictures over on this Gitlab wiki but most of the pictures out there that are not listed there yet.
Isn't that because the focus of the project is on the mechanics of the microscope and not the optics? You could show nice photos even with a non-flexure based mechanism. The advantage is the usability.
The Foldscope Project has been an interesting one-- a low-cost microscope made primarily from paper, offering 140x magnification: https://www.foldscope.com/
"Foldscope Instruments Inc’s mission is to break down the price barrier between people & the curiosity and excitement of scientific exploration!"
A piece of paper and glass for $10? I own $5 pocket microscope from aliexpress with good tube optics (as for $5), bright LED and easy one-hand operation, and it is excellent https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4000574841522.html
Isn't that a digital microscope? I thought an optical microscope would be one that just uses lenses and eyepieces to magnify and show the images to one or more eyes.
Maybe I've missed something. It looks cool - but I'm not sure I understand what the purpose of OpenFlexure is from reading the website, what does it do that an old fashioned optical/mechanical microscope doesn't (or one with a digital eyepiece)? Is this meant to find things automatically?
"Flexture" refers to the type of mechanism that moves the sample stage relative to the objective lens. It means that instead of a high precision rack-and-pinion gear system that moves the stage, it uses "flexure joints" which don't necessarily need to be precision machined (they can be 3D printed).
In a flexture mechanism you apply force to a flexible bar and, because of geometry, that displacement gets translated and reduced into a much smaller displacement somewhere else. It only works with very small displacements (thus fine for microscopy). If you want to position the sample large distances, you just need to move the sample.
It's a neat idea made inexpensive by 3D printing, but the major expense here will be the optics (the objective lens). To get decent pictures of cells, like in a textbook, you're talking about $1K minimum, and it can go much higher, into the 10's, depending on application, performance and other optics (the light source and it's lenses).
Unfortunately you can't recover information that was never captured, which is the main issue with cheaper lenses. They tend to have more abberations [1], which prevents capturing high quality information.
Do all optical aberrations go away if you use a curved image plane?
And if you correct aberrations in software then you can use the cheapest lenses (a single element objective and eyepiece) without having to correct for these aberrations in glass.
Well if you use narrowband colour filters (or light up the sample using narrowband LEDs) and refocus every time you switch, then you could eliminate chromatic aberration completely.
You would have to slightly rescale the image for each colour but that is not impossible.
Sounds like a tradeoff between processing time and image clarity / cost, same as computational photography in smartphones. That looks like a win to me, hopefully we will see innovations in this area so cheap microscopes with great resolving power becomes available to the masses.
One problem in amateur astronomy is that people love spending money on expensive gear (like hifi audio nuts) and they think software is hard. So they sneer at technically complex solutions even if they end up cheaper in long run.
I assume microscopy has the same problem. Why make it cheap when you charge thousands of dollars for selling a top optical quality microscope?
I could be wrong. Haven’t tried it yet. But I haven’t given up on the idea yet.
No, a very good Chinese made RMS objective can cost less than $25 at lower magnification. Plan Achromatic objectives cost a little more, but will give flatter, clearer images than cheaper ones.
It seems a tube lens is used anyway, so the advantages of infinity system objectives are not as obvious. I’d stick to DIN160 or so called Olympus compatible objectives.
You'd be surprised at what you can accomplish with a couple hundred dollar plan achromat objective. (Though OpenFlexure's design complicates the use of immersion oil...)
The main value of this is a low-cost precision positioning system that can be 3d-printed. A lot of the challenge of microscopy is getting the sample into the right place. And yes, this design can be motorised and controlled automatically as well.
Richard Bowman (previously Cambridge uni, now Bath) was the main driver of these microscopes and is a great, highly intelligent person. Many other people have contributed to the project in small and large ways over the years.
This is a super cool project. Though I think the website could be a lot more upfront about what is needed to make this and what this can accomplish. A quick list of pats, estimated cost, specs and a sample photo would be really helpful in assessing whether this is a better deal that a $150 used microscope.
As it is, it takes three clicks to find the list of parts required and no cost estimates are offered.
https://build.openflexure.org/openflexure-microscope/v6.1.5/...
I’m genuinly curious: what do you mean by vaporware?
It usually means some software or hardware which is advertised but not available to buy. Here with a few clicks you can find literal printable files, detailed manual on assembly and the software and a scientific paper describing the project. And that is just a quick scan. What makes it vaporware then?
Clearly you can’t buy it, but you can download it right now and start printing it.
I used the terms “appears to” deliberately. There appeared to be no shots of actual output (see other notes on this page), finished builds or builds in progress, and nothing but renders of the product. A little disconcerting. Normally you’d see both on the homepage of a cool project like this one, along with smiling students showing theirs off, etc.
I built one a few months ago for our middle school science lab. It's relatively mature-- a decent mechanical system for the optics, with an OK (simple) optical design, and great build instructions.
The places where it's lacking: the electrical parts for motor drivers are clunky and annoying to build. The software could be a little better. And the transmissive microscopy setup is a bit dodgy.
I've built variants of these years ago for a school. The positioning system works extremely well, especially given the fact that it is 3d-printed; the optics were rather limited, both by lens quality and by the use of the old rasperry pi camera sensor.
I've looked into building a "high resolution optics" version. Most parts [1] are easily sourceable, but the tube lens [2] has proven to be difficult.
It seems half inch diameter, 50mm focal length achromatic doublets are not that common; Thorlabs does seem to be the only source, and are (at least at the moment) not in stock.
Since you've done the research, I hope you don't mind me asking (I have little to none formal knowledge in optics).
I am trying to build a homemade projector, I was looking for what I think is a 'broadband' (visible light) 'non-polarizing' 50:50 beamsplitter but all the beamsplitters I found are quite expensive. Is there a 'lower quality' hobbyist-grade product range of beamsplitters that you could point me to? (Brands or distributors is also fine)
I'm certainly no expert, my knowledge is limited to what I picked up after a few nights of reading about the microscope.
Does the beamsplitter have to be non-polarizing? My understanding is that standard beamsplitters do the splitting by polarizing the incoming light.
Now that I think of it, you're probably using a standard display as your image source? That does indeed produce polarized light. In that case I would try a (common in photography) circular polarizing filter. Rotate the filter to match the display polarization, after that the light will be circularly polarized.
I think you could use that in combination with a "standard" polarizing beamsplitter. Depending on the desired dimensions, there are a few available on aliexpress.
Thanks for the firsthand report. It occurs to me that optics have not gone through any of the disruptions that electronics have. It’s still difficult to find good lenses at a student budget price.
