Part Procurement

The miniscope system is consists of a machined plastic housing, custom Printed Circuit Boards (PCBs), and off the shelf components. This guide will take you through the process of ordering everything you need to build a system of your own.

Head Mounted Scope

Machined Housing Parts

The design files for all parts that need to be machined can be found here: File:ScopeMachinedParts.zip. We have included both the Solidworks files as well as exported each part as a .stl.

The three housing components (MainBody, FocusingSlider, FilterSetCover) are CNC machined out of Delrin plastic. While the parts themselves are not too complex, their small size and thin walls makes them tricky to machine. Your campus machine shop should be able to machine these parts for you but generally this will take longer and be significantly more expensive than sending the parts out for machining.

Shylo Stiteler is a local machinist that is very familiar with our project. You can contact Shylo by email, shylostiteler@gmail.com, with the parts you need machined. His work is very reasonably priced, quick, and consistent.

We also should mention Protolabs for general machining projects. They are very quick and reliable but will not machine parts with wall thickness under 1mm. This means they won't be able to machine the majority of scope parts without added addition mass.

Machined Aluminum Baseplate

The design file for the Baseplate can also be found here: File:ScopeMachinedParts.zip. Similar to what is stated above, this part can likely be machined by your local machine shop but we recommend getting the part machined by Shylo Stiteler's company, shylostiteler@gmail.com.

Optical Components

The optical components in the microscope are all off the shelf components which generally have less than a week lead time to arrive.

Diced filter set

We use Chroma filters sets in all our scopes but have also had success with Semrock and Omega Optical filters. All three of these companies will dice their standard filters to what ever size you need. The filter set and dice dimensions we use can be found on our parts list, File:MasterPartsList.xls, and you can contact Dick Stewart <dstewart@chroma.com> for a price quote.

Internal lenses

Both the half-ball lens and achromatic lens can be purchased through Edmund Optics. Part numbers can be found on our parts list, File:MasterPartsList.xls.