Smart Microscopy for Everyone
Overview
The OpenFlexure Microscope has been replicated hundreds of times around the world, from makerspaces to superresolution microscopy labs. Its main offering to the scientific community is a high performance flexure stage for precise XYZ motion that can be almost entirely 3D printed, but we have since added many optical, mechanical, and software features to make it a versatile instrument in its own right. In this talk we’ll cover what is possible using our frugal instrument, and take a tour around the increasingly broad community that has grown up around it. This includes our detailed calibration of the microscope’s optics and mechanics, as well as recent developments towards error correcting “smart” microscopy. The microscope is used in applications from malaria research through to education in schools, and we will highlight several projects that make use of it. Some of the most exciting developments have come from integrating the OpenFlexure Microscope with other projects – including UC2 (YouSeeToo) and ImJoy.io. As well as mentioning what is possible by combining projects together, we will discuss how we are using Internet of Things technologies to make it easier to link projects together across programming languages, operating systems, and hardware architectures.
Speaker
Dr Richard Bowman is a Royal Society URF and Proleptic Reader at the University of Bath, who works on lab automation, microscopy, and open source hardware. He has led the OpenFlexure project over the last 6 years, from Friday-afternoon prototype to a well tested design that’s been replicated hundreds of times and is under evaluation for malaria diagnostics in Tanzania. He is passionate about the benefits that smarter equipment can bring to scientific research, particularly when it is coupled with researchers who are able to automate it. He hopes that the hardware and software innovations that make the OpenFlexure microscope a useful research tool will “trickle up” to more expensive and conventional projects, as we move towards a more open and interconnected ecosystem of scientific instruments in our labs.
Related Publications
Collins, J. T., Knapper, J., Stirling, J., Mduda, J., Mkindi, C., Mayagaya, V., Mwakajinga, G. A., Nyakyi, P. T., Sanga, V. L., Carbery, D., White, L., Dale, S., Jieh Lim, Z., Baumberg, J. J., Cicuta, P., Mcdermott, S., Vodenicharski, B., & Bowman, R. (2020). Robotic microscopy for everyone: the OpenFlexure microscope. Biomedical Optics Express, 11(5), 2447-2460. https://doi.org/10.1364/BOE.385729
Sharkey, J. P., Foo, D. C. W., Kabla, A., Baumberg, J. J., & Bowman, R. W. (2016). A one-piece 3D printed flexure translation stage for open-source microscopy. Review of Scientific Instruments, 87(2), [025104]. https://doi.org/10.1063/1.4941068
Repositories
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