elmi Community Room Workshop
The STEM Optics Kit Extended: education, training and prototyping
Christian Feldhaus, Max Planck Institute for Biology, Tübingen, Germany
The STEM Optics kit has been developed in a collaboration between German BioImaging and fischertechnik. The application for the original set is teaching optics in primary and secondary schools. However, with a few commercially available, low-cost extensions, it can be used to demonstrate and teach many advanced microscopy/ imaging principles. Configuration and modification of different beam paths on the simple optical bench system is quick and easy and can be tested in the community room.
As the system is made out of simple building blocks with many degrees of freedom for assembly, it can also be used as a platform for prototyping, and we will also showcase some examples.
The OpenFlexure microscope
Freya Whiteford, University of Glasgow, UK
The OpenFlexure Microscope is a compact, fully motorised lab microscope with built-in automation. It has been replicated thousands of times, in over 50 countries and on every continent. Most of its parts can be 3D printed on basic printers, and its openly licensed design and assembly instructions have been extensively refined over seven years to ensure it is an easy and reproducible instrument to build. OpenFlexure Microscopes are found in incubators, pathology labs, field trips, community groups, and educational settings – and are increasingly used as a platform on which to implement a variety of more advanced optical microscopy techniques. We will showcase its capabilities, and highlight some activities going on in the global community that has grown up around the microscope. In the Community Room, there will be opportunities to get hands-on with some OpenFlexure Microscopes, and to see details of how they work and how they are built.
Building a microscope is simple – We said
Haoran Wang, Leibniz Institute of Photonic Technologies (IPHT)/openUC2 GmbH, Jena, Germany
Even though yet a challenge, sharing microscopy images and their corresponding processing software is simple in comparison to recreating the hardware that acquires them. However, with the growing number of open-source electronics, low-cost optoelectronics components and a huge open-source developer and user community, building and distributing low-cost microscopes has greatly improved. In this workshop, we invite you to join a journey with the concept of an open-source microscope using UC2 [1] and the Matchboxscope [2], which focuses on different approaches for diverse applications. The microscopes are ranged from several to thousand euros which can fulfill many fundamental use cases. We show you how easy it is to build a simple smartphone microscope and how the same components can be rearranged to form a complex and fully automated light-sheet microscope.
This will give a solid base to discuss the future of decentralized microscopy and how we can form networks of data collection, storage and processing using open-source tools. Microscopy control and image processing software cannot live without their hardware counterpart and vice versa, so let’s think of them more closely together. In order to ease experience exchange, we established an online tutorial and forum to benefit the active community around the world [3].
By creating an open business model that relies entirely on open source and community building, we aim to create an example of how open innovation from science can be scaled up using open-source licenses [4].
Keywords: Modular Microscopy, UC2, ImSwitch, Matchboxscope, 3D printing, Remote Controlled Microscopy
[1] Diederich B, Lachmann R, Carlstedt et al., “A versatile and customizable low-cost 3D-printed open standard for microscopic imaging”. Nature Commun” doi:10.1038/s41467-020-19447-9
[2] https://matchboxscope.github.io/
[3] https://openuc2.discourse.group/
[4] https://openuc2.com