Franken-scope Microscope modifications.

It looks weird, but she's great. All mods turned out nicely.

I just got a few extras added recently. Nice fella on eBay let me have the adjustable magnifier for $600 instead of the $1300. Now I can see a smaller field when I want to since the camera Cmos sensor is pretty big. High resolution cameras tend to give a wider view capture, making things appear of lower magnification. The magnifier fixes that problem.

So these things are connected to the Peltier coolers I mounted on the camera to cool it and to control the 100w highCRI (97+) LED . The three units control the brightness of the light source and how much power the cooling peltiers get. The 2 peltiers on the left are able to give each of the peltiers 12v 9amps. The LED 32v 3.5amps. Putting these in between the power supply saved effort building more circuit boards. These current limiting supplies from Alieexpress are cheap and work well. The chiller on top can get too cold and condensation drips everywhere, so being able to turn those down is great. surprising how cold they get.

You can see the huge metal heatsink with 12v high rpm fan. Underneath is the cooler plates and the white stuff is thermal paste to conduct the heat. I am keeping the camera cool because it should lower noise for critical images in dark-field. I haven’t used it much yet but I could already see noise was lower and there were less or no coloured pixels flipped on at full gain with a black background. So maybe that will improve high magnification images, will see soon.

Inside of the box is the 3 switch mode power supplies and you can see the butt end of the 100w led hanging down. This LED is really good, the full spectrum output or 97%+CRI is much warmer than typical cold scope LED’s and the colours during microscopy are far more ranging. The big 300w version is on the floor with a heatsink so big it only just fits on the whole top shelf. I am waiting for a big enough power supply to arrive to test Mr 300. The 300w might be too much and would need much more cooling on the scope side so that the sample and scope do not overheat, maybe not. I am not scared of fire :D

Thought this might be fun for microscope slingers !

The white unit was my proto-base while I keep adding stuff in. The 3 power limiters will get cut in eventually and the large LED mounted in too. Then I have built and programmed a handle control for the deck with image taking buttons and stepper motors. Should save my left arm and my neck from falling off hopefully.

Water dripping down the heatsink fins and camera before I turned down the coolers. It looks a bit odd, but it works well. More so I am Hoping the cooling helps image noise when using the 100x objective. I have to admit that is rather satisfying coming up with mods that actually work well and seeing the difference. Who knows how much the electrically cooled fan version of the camera would of cost, those aren’t cheap, but the cooler I made is cheap and it is able to cool down way lower too.

Its nice to post something that doesn’t have altered blood images it for once.