[dekhn]

No, I don't document and write about my experiments. I've shared them with a tardigrade biologist, but we didn't decide to continue. Also, I'm not a student, I'm a professional computer guy with a hobby and a budget. That said, smart undergrads coudl definitely do this.

Nothing I'm doing is remarkable or complicated, and compared to a research microscope, what I've done is very trivial. It's just a 10X scope with a grbl-controlled XYZ stage and an object detector that finds the center of a tardigrade in realtime, and sends commands to center the tardigrade. Now my interesting is in high speed scanning- instead of taking photos, you literally take a video while actively moving the head around and then stitching it all together. Not stopping to take pictures increases the rate of acquistion 10X or more.

The reality is that I could have done everything I wanted to do by spending about $10K for a kit from Thorlabs, but I was interested in learning more about building precision stages from inexpensive components, so that if/when I ever do get to play with the expensive toys, I know why they are better, anbd why they cost so much money.

The interesting area now is SPIM see https://openspim.org/Step_by_step_assembly which is definitely something a well-funded hobbyist could do.

[moh_maya]

Thank you!