[DIYbio] Re: automated fluorescent microscope

I have built a few LED-base fluorescent microscopes for custom research projects. One issue you will have to deal with is that the spectral bandwidth of a LED is very broad, i.e. although a blue LED might peak at 480nm, significant light will be emitted even at 510nm where you want to measure say, GFP.

That means you will definitely need dichroic bandpass filters on both the optical emission and excitation pathways, otherwise the unfiltered light will overwhelm the signal generated from the fluorescent specimen. As the light needs to enter the bandpass filter as parallel as possible, you will need to use a collimating lens on the LED in front of the bandpass filter. Its not all the band though, the LED and lenses can be bought for about $10, and you can actually get good bandpass filters on ebay for around $20.

-Dave

On Friday, June 27, 2014 12:30:17 PM UTC+2, Michael Shamberger wrote:

Hi,

I am interested in building an automated microscope that would be useful for synthetic biology.  Features would include automated tracking and classification of individual live bacteria.  Videos of the time lapse images would be transmitted and assembled in a PC and post processed with machine learning techniques.  I am a computer engineer so the robotics and machine learning are in my domain.  I want to understand the design for a DIY microscope in the sub 1000 range that would have the capability of creating the images.  

From what I have been researching on the web, I was thinking to build a LED Fluorescent microscope.  I am starting from the microscope design at openlabtools.org.  It uses a Rasberry pi and 5MB raspberry pi camera with an infinity optical system.  I want to add a fluorescent stage to that.  There are some DIY articles about LED Fluorescent microscopes but are lacking details though I continue to search.  If someone could point me in the right direction I would appreciate it.  I need information about where to source low cost LED's and design. 

Mike