My wife's Galaxy S8 has a pretty great camera—certainly better than what you'd find on any of the microscopes in our lab. She was looking for an easy way to photograph her slides with it, so I designed this.
While I've made a more universal smartphone-microscope adapter in the past, it required a bit of fiddly adjustment when mounted to the camera before images could be captured. As my goal was to make my wife's life easier, that wouldn't be good enough.
This one isn't universal, but it's much easier to use—sliding the phone into the adapter perfectly aligns the camera with the optical axis of the microscope, at the proper distance away from the ocular to achieve a sharp focus. I designed it with a specific microscope in mind—an Olympus CH30—but made it modular so it'd be easy to adapt to other microscopes. By splitting it into two parts—a phone carrier and a ocular mount—I'd only need to print a new ocular mount to use it with other models. This also made it easier to print, obviating the need for supports as the separate parts are printable without overhangs.
I designed the adapter using PTC Creo in September 2018. If you're interested in downloading it, head over to Thingiverse.
As an aside, this is one of the first prints I've made on my newest printer, an Anycubic Kossel Linear Plus Delta. I bought this recently as a kit from eBay, so that I'd have a second, more compact printer for small-apartment living. It's incredible how cheap high-quality printers have become!
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