I think one could assemble the remaining optical path and camera for less than the remaining $4070.
Well, I know so, because, I did exactly that several years ago with a telecentric lens form Edmunds and a industrial C-mount camera back and an even cheaper 3018 CNC for automated inspection and archival scanning of PCBs. (telecentric lens due to the boards being populated with components, this helps capture them without focus stacking and without perspective).
In my opinion, if you've shipped 2 or more units at the given prices... You've actually priced it right for your target market!
If I can do it on a small scale with my long-suffering Ender 3 (which keeps getting weirder and weirder stuff stuck to it), then transplanting it to a larger motion platform is trivial.
What did you do for software?
I think I spent more time trying to make a little tk-inter GUI for it ... that I never actually used because I all did was step in a regular grid pattern at a fixed speed... than everything else combined, and that included printing a combo ring light/lens holder-to-spindle-adapter to mount the lens in the CNC.
It was a fun single-day project. Seems like I should have started a company selling them.
I'm kind of tempted. I assume the objectives aren't infinity corrected?
Just found - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_IWTq-TSiU which shows something similar. It looks like there's a ring that seems to adjust magnification on it, unless I'm mistaken.
I've got a DIY XY stage and would like to attach something like that too it, to image large objects (I've got a BHM microscope but the stage has only a small degree of movement).
Edit: Just noticed the objectives used are infinity corrected
Ah yes, there, you found the other component to pair with the cheap 3018 cnc platform. :-)
Its also the first time we've started a company like this and are constantly exploring ways to validate PMF, iterate faster, and improve sales / marketing. Please reach out if you'd be interested to chat about the business side, grab coffee in silicon valley, etc.
If those are 5 mil traces with 5 mil spacing, then you might get better performance with a simple smartphone camera. The built in superresoloution algorithms seem to do a decent job on PCB's.
One of the first things I thought when I started was "how can I get the big camera onto the microscope" and the embarrassing conclusion I came to, is if you've got an expensive phone you can get cheap plastic adaptors and just attach it to the microscope body. Basic stereo microscopes are incredibly cheap these days, as are the phone attachments. I use droidcam obs to stream video so I don't even have to physically look into the microscopes any more. The main thing is going into the phone and getting some practice getting everything on manual so phone photo software doesn't do funky things.
My use case is slightly different, but the underlying principles are the same and I'm pretty sure the microscope hardware is identical to that in the post, so rather than rigging up a custom attachment to the expensive camera, I just rig up the phone camera to the already existent hardware of the microscope.
See crab spider for example of one of my earliest tests: https://imgur.com/xLS07WY
Elsewhere on this thread, some company appears to be re-using the 3018 CNC form factor to build inspection microscopes. That's a remarkably cost-efficient way to get pretty good results in terms of motion. I've also purchased simple 1D stages and stacked them get get a full XYZ stage for very little money.
Stereo microscope magnifications are typical at about 20x to 40x, but I'll commonly go to 640x on the biological one, though in practice you bug out at the physical limits of optical microscopy just above 1000x.
His specific setup is presumably limited by the magnification provided by whatever his objective lens achieves.
With flash on, it can give quite a detailed look at your board. You could then strap a macro lens onto your phone if you need even more magnification.
I used to use this and also take still images, but I'm on an older iphone and apple introduced a bug which makes the still image blurry after you capture it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mb659_4yIZ0
(I realize the youtube player really sucks for this, the effect is seen in the last second of the video but youtube just _has_ to shove its related videos screen in your face once you get near the end of the video)
