Just noticed that the camera mount on our microscope is compatible with the rpi camera. My dream of having a one-click 'capture' button that saves photos from the microscope to our network drive is one step closer to reality!
@cibomahto Oh oh! I share this dream! Do you have any other optics in-between the vertical optical port and the RPi camera? Is the camera finnicky to locate within the field of view?
@theterg The microscope came with a poor quality camera that happened to have a C-mount, so I just replaced it with the RPi camera. The tube does have a piece of glass in it. The camera is a little wobbly so the focal plane isn't totally aligned; might take a little work to shore that up- perhaps it is contributing to lack of clarity in the magnified photos.
@cibomahto Thanks for sharing! I have my own setup where I borrow one of the eyepieces and fit it to the 3rd tube and then strap a webcam to it. But even the hassle of that operation is too slow.
I'll have to take another dig at finding the right C-mount adapter, or maybe just break down and buy a third eyepiece...
@theterg My partner made a 3d printed adapter for mounting a cell phone camera to an eyepiece, but it wasn't ideal either.
@cibomahto Yes! There's a chance I was inspired by your post 🙏 because I built a similar thing for my own cellphone. It's funny how impatient I find myself in this situation - if it takes more than 10-20 seconds to find the little adapter pieces and set up the camera, i'd almost rather take the photo through the eyepiece freehand like i've been doing for so many years!
Perhaps this is more of a mental fortitude problem than en engineering one 😅
@cibomahto ooh that's a nice find! I'm very unhappy with my microscope camera's firmware and something with my own software would be a nice upgrade