My first OFM: The DeltaStage

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Want to get into microscopy to aid for example in my ceramics projects or for metallurgy stuff, so I decided to start out with the delta stage and using reflection illumination.

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Next step: Waiting for stepper arrival and wiring everything up

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Stepper motors are fully assembled now and I’m making my own sangaboard next.

Attaching the gears to the steppers didn’t work as expected though, even using the electrical tape trick, I had to reprint the gears with flat_shaft_w=3.0 so they pressed on firmly.

Currently I’m mostly confused by the optics module’s emission and excitation filters: Any guides on how to select them?

Bet I’m not the only optics noob here around :slight_smile:

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The Delta stage is rather behind the design of the main cartesian OpenFlexure Microscope. There are several parts that are improved in the Microscope v7, including the small gears which are now tightened with screws. There is a branch of the Delta stage which has components moved over to the designs from the v7 Microscope.

Similarly the Reflection Optics have not had as much work. If you are doing simple reflection rather than fluorescence then you do not need any filters, just a neutral beamsplitter. For reflection there can be stray light issues with the illumination light that goes through the beamsplitter and hits the back of the holder. The holder is black, but PLA is quite shiny.

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Hey,

first of all, thanks for the response!
I know I’m a bit late :wink: and I also discovered the fact, that I don’t need fancy filters for my use-case in the mean time…

Anyway, what I really want to convey here is the following:

  • life turned around on me so there hasn’t been any progress since my last post
  • me not making any further progress has neither anything to do with the documentation of the project, nor the support here in the forums, it’s a me thing!
  • I didn’t grew frustrated on the project (at least so far)
  • in fact, I consider all parts of the documentation I followed up to this point as way superioir than the average thingiverse/printables/… model instructions. very straight forward, JustWorks™ (regarding the 3D-printed parts)
  • I’ll keep you posted as I continue my journey

So long
fxk8y

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