So first off my apologies for going dark, I could have sworn I responded to the earlier messages but must have never hit send.
I think I lack a lot of technical expertise/vocabulary to say exactly what I’m looking for so a picture might help, I’ve attached my setup which is essentially four scopes (as many as I can fit) crammed into a cell culture incubator.
I image mammalian cells infected with yeast with these and don’t need particularly powerful magnification or a robust image acquisition platform to be able to see the things I’m interested in. As of now I use the default pi optics and they’re amazing. When I tested the C270 I think I just used the default webcam app and it looked great, just a smaller field of view than I’d like.
My idea was that using USB webcams I could run four scopes off of one pi since these scopes are always right next to each other and never move and all I’m doing is flicking on an LED and calling a webcam snapshot via python every minute or so, and that way I could 1. cut down on costs and 2. free up some of my pis for more scopes since they’re still constantly out of stock everywhere.
So basically I’m not married to the C270 and would be interested in any USB webcam as long as the field of view ends up large enough to get a good amount of cells at a high enough magnification (similar to the default raspberry pi optics would be perfect).
Also in case anyone is wondering for their own applications, I’ve had these things in the humid and warm (37 C) incubators for like 2 years now and they’re doing fine. The PLA gets very brittle so it’s easy to accidentally snap the stage if you’re not careful while doing repairs, and it’s almost hilarious how warped the feet get as the nitrile bands pull at them but the only actual issue I’ve had is occasionally moisture will get trapped underneath the lens in the optics spacer which ruins the image but all you have to do is take the scope out of the incubator and run a lens wipe over those bits to dry them out.