good morning,
-- seems like it's hard to beat good ole Van Leeuwenhoek.... as some might have seen, i have been fiddling around with cheap DIY microscopes for a couple of years.
you can download a nice bilingual instructions here
also i did many tests adding a lens to a smart phone. works very easily and it's possible to get much better pics, than the ones mentioned above. important is to get a stable setup and decent lighting condition.
you can try lenses from old webcams or laser pointers to start with, or small spherical lenses that you can also buy... or even make yourself leeuwenhoek staaaayle.
other options is to hack the lens from a DVD drive to be able to focus electronically.
the internet is full of instructions and hacks to turn your i-phone into a decent microscope. this young designer just made a nice clip-on... still talking to him to share the design on thingyverse.
i am happy that all channels, hackathons, media are used to spread the message of building DIY microscopes is easy. especially when we think about other places in the world, eg africa.
we succesfully imaged trypanasomes, a parasite in the blood that causes sleeping sickness.
the claims of the above mentioned "app" to detect malaria "cells"... i am a bit skeptic, also generally pissed of by this post-colonial hi-jacking of the big health challenges of the developing countries to win money in the west during hackathons. malaria is caused by another parasite of the genus plasmodium, especially p. falciparum. but yes, microscopy is the so called gold standard of diagnosing it. new fluorescent staining methods have made a big impact recently, combined with "cheap" LED powered microscopes. but they are still quite expensive.
but still I think there is a big potential for the DIY microscope, either for a smart phone (which is not low-cost) or using hacked webcam, for malaria blood smear tests and other neglected tropical diseases... or in the end just in public education all over the world. generally an automated and computer vision detection would be great!
my friend akbar has already developed new nice version of the MICAM microscopes and gave them to schools all over indonesia.
greets,
marc
On Monday, August 4, 2014 11:56:59 PM UTC+2, Will Sutton wrote:
On Monday, August 4, 2014 11:56:59 PM UTC+2, Will Sutton wrote:
On Monday, August 4, 2014 11:13:43 AM UTC-4, Bryan Bishop wrote:That sounds like regular old venture backed biotech to me.It was built by a high school student in 30 hours with a piece of rubber, electric tape, and toilet paper...how does that sound like regular old biotech? I think he gets a small prize, not financing to start a business yet.What I think is compelling is that it beat all the other social/bitcoin/location app non-sense that people are spending their time on. If there were more success stories like this, I think there'd be more people trying to get involved in bio-based tech.
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