microscopy

AmScope upgrades

April 23, 2016

I designed a 3D-printable eyepiece holder that mates a Raspberry Pi camera to a popular inexpensive stereo inspection scope. This lets me send 5MP images from my AmScope straight to the network, without the need for a laptop!

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The design files are here on Thingiverse.

I’m also using this awesome Raspberry Pi case with a chunk of Misumi extruded aluminum to hold the Pi in place.

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An external button from an old joystick is wired to the GPIO lines. Using Adafruit’s Retrogame GPIO keyboard emulator, this hits the enter key to tell raspistill to take a photo every time the button is pressed. It’s connected to an old LCD monitor, giving me a nice big view of what’s under the scope.

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Glad to know my microscope is running a pre-empting kernel…

The pi automatically logs in on the console at boot, and saves its images to a folder watched by Bittorrent Sync, which then pushes it out automatically to the WiFi.

Turn it on, hit the button, picture lands on the network. Perfect!

More photos