Focussing mechanism for a cellphone microscope
After collecting a small personal museum of microscopes (I don’t have a very big house, so there are limits to it), it was thrilling to complete a project with Yash (BS-MS 2018) and Prof. Rapol in Physics @iiserpune, where we added a 3D printed mechanism for focus adjustment for a portable ball lens microscope. The help we got from Dr. Manu Prakash at Stanford to get us started needs to be mentioned. His energy in spreading portable microscopy in parts of LDCs (less developed country) like India has got a lot of people to get “back to the basics”. In our work we got some help in terms of samples from the lab of Dr. Krishanpal Karmodiya, who works with Plasmodium infected cells for understanding the genomics of malaria. Kudos to the team and looking forward to more developments.
The 3D files of the device we have described in our paper are Open Source and available to download [Github link]. Anybody with access to a 3D printer should in principle be able to make this.
Reference:
Yash Jawale, Umakant Rapol and Chaitanya A. Athale (2018) Open Source 3D printed focussing mechanism (3DPFM) for cellphone based cellular microscopy. 12-Nov-2018 J. Microsc. https://doi.org/10.1111/jmi.12765