Hi all!
I’m a Statistician and I’m interested in participating in this community. I’ve bought the IORodio kit and will be assembling the v7 microscope in a few weeks, but I’m particularly interested in understanding the math and details behind light microscopy in general, as well as what I’d need to know to modify the design in various ways. Are there good resources/books available to learn about the math details around designing a light microscope?
In particular, I’m interested in designing a lower magnification portable version that works with a phone camera or possibly an arduino USB camera attached to the phone, but I don’t understand enough details to know if this is feasible or obviously not going to work.
I have very little lab experience, and in particular I don’t really have access to any materials to experiment with besides things that I can 3D print. So this is why a book or similar would be very helpful! Also, if there are any statistical or software development challenges that I could help with, I’d be happy to look at it and see if it aligns with my experience.
Thank you,
Torey Hilbert
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Hi @ToreyHilbert. There is a lot in that post. For general microscopy the Nikon MicroscopyU has a lot of resources and interactive tutorials.
There are quite a few threads here using lower magnification with a 4x microscope objective, and discussing the various challenges of that lower magnification with the general structure that is aimed at higher magnification. Particularly the recent thread Refletion microscope without beam splitter includes discussion of using a commercial ‘USB microscope’, or the OpenFlexure Field Dissection Microscope Refletion microscope without beam splitter - #6 by j.stirling, or a modified version of the OpenFlexure Microscope basic optics module Refletion microscope without beam splitter - #17 by biodotpe . You could also look at the OpenFlexure Manual microscope using a USB webcam, or in the customisations and alternatives there is an optics module for an Arducam USB camera.
What is appropriate will critically depend on what you are aiming to do with the microscope.
Our software development roadmap is available on our GitLab repository gitlab.com/openflexure. The issues, milestones and merge requests show where we working on different parts of the project.
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Here is another portable option that I tried in the past: Seeed Studio XIAO Meets OFM? - #5 by biodotpe This configuration requires an appropriate light source and power supply to be a functional portable microscope 
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