Ok, this is both sad and funny.

This post
https://mastodon.social/@relet/111494635877034873

is now three years old, and it describes a piece of bricolage that has been on my desk for at least as long. About once a year I manage to come up with a new idea, dust off the old hardware, bin the parts that stopped working, recover something else, and pretty much enjoy the process, without getting very far.

It happened again. Eppur si muove. It struck me that after successfully recovering the 3D printer last year (the on-board controller is b0rken, but octoprint still manages to control it for a print), I could just chuck THE ENTIRE microscopy setup on the printer platform.

The issue until now was, if I move the platform of the microscope, the XY controls move along with it. So I would need to attach two brackets and heavy motors to the part that essentially should not vibrate. Now with frankenscope, instead of the microscope controls, I attach a slide holder to the printing head. It actually decouples for Z movement which is done by an arduino on the microscope.

Effectively I send G code to the printer on one port, and something else to an arduino on the other, and then fetch images from the phone on USB.

It works. By now, the mess is part of the aesthetics. It's also an exercise in using whatever was available, and surprisingly good at compensating for the wonky mechanics using optical feedback. Fortunately the image processing doesn't care where the data has been.

I'm now able to start a scan and come back a few hours later for the results. So, I guess I will soon be able and more motivated to update https://setzkasten.relet.net again. Maybe this year.