This DIY microscope design combines many of my hobbies; Lego, electronics, 3D printing, Arduino, Raspberry Pi, etc.
My design is a remix of a great and well documented design of Yuksel Temizon. My version is also built of LEGO bricks, but uses also LEGO Technic beams because they are light and strong. For capturing images it uses a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with an 8MP camera and modified lens. The six stepper motors for the camera & sample movements and the power LED for illumination are controlled by two PCB's with an Arduino Pro mini on each PCB.
- One PCB (Mainboard) contains all the driver hardware for the steppers and power LED
- The other PCB (Controller board) contains the human interface elements for controlling the microscope. Such as; Three joysticks to control the X, Y, Rotary, Tilt (Camera-angle), Magnitude and Focus, a Rotary encoder to control the Power LED and a small OLED display to indicate the brightness of the power LED
I used the 3D printed LEGO gears and adapters of the original design
So, after many hours of building pleasure, I'm going to do some nice experiments now