HI, I am a photographer/ filmmaker who has very little electronics and no coding experience (besides making a LED blink with an Arduino!) . A am wanting to setup a system where I can electronically move the slide, maybe with something like a joystick for x and y axis- without needing to access a computer to shoot good quality video only. I would like to just have the sensor feeding out to HDMI for recording. Has anyone done this? Because I dont know very much about stepper motors, I thought I could use geared DC motors (I found some the same size as the existing steppers the project has) and use a simpler controller to connect a potentiometer based joystick like this- How to Control Two Motors with a Joystick - Soldering Mind. Or am I going down the wrong road? Will using steppers suit better and I should force myself to learn a bit more? or should also buy a plug and play unit like this- Instrument In A Box - Precision Joystick Stepper Controller+Driver - 2 Channel XY/Pan-tilt. , although I would need to find a different stepper motor that the project tends to use- but modify the mounts. Any help would be really appreciated , cheer Paul
Hi Paul. I have a hard time understanding what is that you want to control with the stepper motors? Do you want to control the openflexure microscope with a joystick? Or you mean motorize a standard light microscope stage?
Hi, yes, I would like to move the x and y axis smoothly and more organically with a joystick, without the need of the raspberry pi. I don’t need to repeat any movements. But I have managed to get stepper motors that suit the design to work with arduino control very smoothly, so might have teh solution. As for the focus, I haven’t worked this out yet. I haven’t built the microscope yet, only printed and waiting for some extra parts. But I didn’t realise the raspberry pi camera is only 2k resolution with video. I have used a Blackmagic micro on another microscope, so might see if I can use this instead as the camera within the openfixtfure unit.
Everything is possible. I am sure you need a raspberry pi to control the z axis with the openflexure microscope. Some have used a webcam instead of the raspberry pi but that requires modifying the model to adapt the camera on your part. Perhaps you could adapt Perhaps you could use something like this:
hi, thanks for this link. cheers Paul