Thanks to the nice people at the Maker Shed of Make Magazine we have an awesome new microscope to play with.
To prove the point that you don't need automation in order to capture a GigaPan style mosaic of images (assuming you have a good eye, and patience :-) I took the following gigapan of part of a 6 inch machinist's ruler. The numbers are tenths of an inch, and the hash marks are hundredths of an inch.
View the full image at GigaPan.org
This image was taken with the 4x objective, which normally has a 40x magnification, and a 4.5mm Field of View. The SLR camera adapter adds 2.5x of magnification, to 100x, and each frame has a 1.8mm field of view.
All thanks to Dan Woods and Rob Bullington at Make Magazine for giving us a huge discount on a 'Compound Oil Immersion Microscope model 163' It is like their model 162 but with a 3rd viewing port which comes straight up.
We also got a SLR Photo Adapter, with a 2.5x magnifying lens which ends in a T-Mount, and a T-Mount adapter for the Canon T2i camera.
The result is a comparatively inexpensive instrument which has a non-motorized xy stage and non-motorized focus knob. We are working to adapt the XY and Z axis to be controlled by stepper motors with an arduino running a slight variant of the G-Code CNC machine code from the Makerbot/RepRap code base (the variation is just ripping out some code and libraries which we don't need in order to make it compile a little easier).
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