Microscope vs Delta Stage

General
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Hi there,

It seems to me that delta stage is lagging behind the flagship Microscope. However I find the argument of a fixed - non moving - objective convincing and speaking in favor of the delta stage. Nonetheless forum activities and progress of the Microscope point into another direction.

  • has anybody done a comparison between the two architectures?
  • is the argument a mute point and more appealing than convincing?
  • what is your recommendation to me going forward?

Thanks and cheers,

Jörg

2

The Microscope has cartesian axes, which is intuitive for manual operation. You cannot really use a Delta geometry manually, but it does have a big advantage in fixed optics for heavy optical systems or for complicated imaging modes. You are also mixing the motors for focus with those for sample movement, but with autofocus that should not matter too much. I don’t think there has been a side-by-side comparison.

Going forward use whichever you think suits your use, and preferably let everyone here know how you get on. The good thing is that the non-printed parts - Raspberry Pi, lens, camera, motors, power supplies etc - are the same for both, so changing your mind is printing the other body and base. That is a long print, but not all that much filament.

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Many thanks for the swift answer. I go for the Delta Station.
To start with, I may run the comparison OFM - DS - capacity pending - myself.

In any case I will report to the forum.

Best,

Jörg

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It’s worth saying that recent efforts to improve the docs and code quality have gone into the Microscope because it has a much bigger userbase and longer history, and so it’s better tested as a product. Our hope is that these improvements will make it into the Delta stage too, but that relies on us figuring out how to better manage the common code (at the moment, a lot of code is just duplicated between projects, which is a maintenance headache).

In terms of advanced features, the Delta stage is where most of the fluorescence and LED array illumination work was done, so it’s actually ahead of the microscope in that respect, but uses older versions of the various libraries we’ve developed because the codebase didn’t get the massive v7 overhaul (yet).

I would be very interested to see a comparison :slight_smile: