Hello everyone,
So i have started to look into openflexure project 2 years ago and i bought all the necessary materials, which includes printing the sangaboard v0.3 and buying all the components for it. It took some time before everything came in and in the meantime i just left it on the second rail… and got back to it after 2 years… Now i see there is a new version of sangaboard called v0.5 and also different design to the printed parts as well.
Now what are the differences between sangaboard v0.3 and v0.5 ? I mean apart from having different brain and prolly one more stepper motor controller. Are there some issues with one or another to address, that the other one does not have ? Any advantages for one or another ?
Hope someone will find this question and its answers useful too. I appreciate your time 
The bottom line is that both work for the motorised Openflexure microscope.
There are versions of the microscope V7.0.0 electronics drawer for either Sangaboard, and they both offer motor control for the three axes and 5V power for illumination. If you have a Sangaboard V0.3 there is no reason not to use it.
Sangaboard V0.5 has a few practical advantages (as well as some extra functions that are not yet used in the microscope software). The main advantage is that Sangaboard V0.5 supplies power to the Pi computer and connects to the 40-pin GPIO. This means that you need only one power supply for the whole microscope, and fewer cables.
Sangaboard V0.5 additionally offers a fourth motor controller and current control for LED illumination. It is based on a Raspberry Pi RP2040 microcontroller, which ends up with a lower component cost for the board.
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For the released V7.0.0-beta1 make sure that you also look at the bugs and bugs fixes in Openflexure Microscope V7.0.0-beta1 released .
The electronics base has been re-designed since the beta1 release, the new version is particularly to address issues with Sangaboard v0.3 and v0.5. this is implemented on the current master Openflexure current build is here! .
Edit 2024-5-17: Beta 2 is now released, so the version of the microscope linked from the main web site now includes all of those updates.
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