Opening a $100,000 Microscope to Show How it Works

why does this microscope cost a hundred thousand dollars we might say oh obviously it's because it has a really high magnification nope its highest magnification is 400 times our 500 Horizon microscope can go up to 2 500 times magnification all right well it must be able to do some special kind of microscopy right nope it could only do transmitted bright field the most basic kind of microscopy so the image quality must just be 10 times better than this 500 microscope maybe I'll let you decide for yourself here's the setup I have the Zeiss microscope with the horizons camera put on it and we're looking at a prepared sample slide this is a Zia stem okay here's the sample looks pretty cool this was a counter-stained sample and I do have this in full cooler illumination and it looks it looks really good and now here's it on the horizons microscope first thing you'll notice is it is more zoomed in on the horizons microscope and it's because the only adapter that I had for the Zeiss is this camera adapter up here which reduces the image by 63 but I mean they're not they're not all that different to be honest I mean the Zeiss is definitely better but it's not it's not like 10 times better it's not even really two times better I mean it's really just like 10 percent better so why does this microscope cost a hundred grand well half the answer is that at the high end of microscopes you pay exponentially more for every marginal boost of image quality the other half is that this is an automated Precision scientific instrument with high repeatability and nanometer scale accuracy in this video we're going to open it up and explore what's inside one of the best microscopes in the world now you may be wondering isn't the camera kind of the limiting factor here and it's not really making use of all that this microscope can do and the answer is yes absolutely if I had a three thousand dollars ice camera I would put it on this thing and I would compare the two but the horizons image would also look way better on a three thousand dollar camera so it is at least a good kind of apples to apples comparison here you know what I do have though is my mirrorless camera but that's what's filming me right now so I'm going to take it off of the tripod and put it onto each one of these microscopes and then I'm just going to edit in what that looks like editors know so yeah this looks worse than the horizons camera does and I think it's because the horizons camera is a microscope specific camera so it has like better Edge detection and it's purpose built for this it's just amusing that the 200 microscope camera performs better than the 900 mirrorless camera but it's just the way it is hey check out what the Zeiss microscope can do you can project if you don't have a camera on it you can just project the image onto the ceiling pretty neat huh what doesn't show up on camera is how absolutely massive and heavy this thing is I mean I mean this is this has to be like 60 70 pounds I mean it throws he throws my back out every single time I try and move it super awkward but they do that for a reason and it's because it attenuates any vibrations that you have going on in the environment so if I had like a desk fan going on the other side of the table you wouldn't see as many of those vibrations under the microscope because once you blow everything up under a microscope any small change you see Moving Like An Earthquake it's just a giant cast piece of aluminum they have machined in parts of it and then have attached on other machine parts there are some plastic components that fit in here as well but this is mostly an all metal microscope you ready to see my magic trick check this out touch the touchscreen and it moved on its own that's right even the objective turret on this thing is motorized and everything else is motorized too this z-axis stage when you move it up and down it's here not moving a direct mechanical connection no no no you're moving a rotary encoder which then sends the signals to some stepper motors which then move because because you can't get as much Precision out of your little dainty little human fingers as you can a big beefy motor actually you'll see inside these things the motors are tiny they're actually running it really fast with like a huge gear ratio and then when you're ready to move the stage around normally this would be clamped up in there but for now I just have it off even this thing you know this this microscope is trying to cosplay as like a normal microscope when you look at it you think oh it's just you turn the little twiddle knobs and it moves how you think it moves but no it's all it's all motorized too of course no yeah I mean look at the number of ports on this thing it's got an Ethernet jacket has a USBC cable and like a million serial ports now what does any of this do I have no idea I when I found this in a dirty Dusty basement I didn't get an instruction manual with it here's a general overview of how this works you got the Illuminator unit over here which would normally be plugged into this little end port here but I'm gonna have it off so you can see how bright this thing is you can turn it all the way up it might not come off on camera but this thing is this thing is bright this is super bright you wouldn't want to look into this thing I'm actually going to turn it off right now because I'm about to open it up and it's going to be like blazing hot I'm going to burn myself in there but so typically you have the light path that comes out of the Illuminator it goes over through here through a bunch of lenses and neutral density filters all kinds of stuff it goes over it bounces off of a mirror it goes up it goes through the condenser unit passes through your sample goes into the objective goes up boom this gets split one goes to the camera and then the image goes to your little little eye holes and that's it this is the Illuminator unit you can see from the outside you can move it in any direction to align the thing where the real magic is is inside of it this is a Tungsten halogen bulb this microscope is from like 2003 early 2000s-ish I have to imagine this is if this was a more modern microscope it probably would be led based I don't know maybe they're still using halogen tungsten bulbs for for modern microscopes because like the wavelength distribution is still slightly more optimal for for Imaging or something like that but in any case I think what's most adorable about this look at this they have a little you can pull off a little clampy thing to hold hold your little tungsten bulb you can pull it out so you don't have to touch the you know touch the bulb with all your oils and stuff and then I mean look at the intricacies of this thing like there's a bunch of little spring-loaded lever clamps these are you know on little tiny machined aluminum housing Parts there's so many incredibly complicated little mechanisms to move this whole assembly back and forth by screwing these little bits there's a lot of really hard to see stuff in here too um just because it's obscured by other smaller parts that are inside of this but like the complexity level of even just the Illuminator portion of this microscope is just as expensive and almost as complicated as like a regular consumer microscope I'm gonna put you back in your little spot little guy I have to press down on the little levers they even have a little holder for the clamp inside of it so adorable and if you look on the inside of this unit this is also pretty neat you know that the tungsten ball that creates light going in every single Direction so you want to collect all that light and direct it you know forward towards the microscope where you want it to go so they have a parabolic just a polished aluminum surface on the inside of this that redirects all that light forward and up through looks to be there is a lens inside of here it's a little hard to tell but there is a lens right there and then on the outside of this you see this like kind of reddish tone to the this piece of glass well it's a it's a it's an anti-reflective coating to you know make sure you don't got light bouncing all over the place where you don't want it uh and I also speculate that this is probably has some additional coatings on it as well perhaps to block out certain wavelengths that you don't want where to smooth out the wavelength distribution of the light that comes out of this if you look backwards through this this lens system you can actually see the filament of the tungsten bulb inside of it kind of neat on the back of the microscope you have this little Port that the Illuminator goes into using this little dovetail joint then you tighten this around you can see that inside of here that there is you know another lens so we got one lens in here another lens in here but wait there are more lenses that control this Illuminator light big reveal we have all the illumination Optics underneath of this thing it's pretty amazing that like half of this microscope is dedicated just to controlling the light that's illuminating your sample so you have one lens up here we have another lens that is in here this is the neutral density filter the fuel diaphragm and then there's another lens here and then the mirror that shines it up towards the the condenser now you might be wondering why there are so many lenses that happen after the Illuminator light comes out and it's because if we shine this up against the back wall here you can kind of see that you can you can just see the you can see the filament the the shape of the filament from the tungsten bulb so if you're under a microscope this is is this is not ideal you don't want to see the image of the bulb overlaid over the sample you're trying to look at ideally what you'd have going on is that you would have a completely just white flat background you can no shapes nothing it's just completely white and so the way that they do that in this microscope is something called cooler illumination effectively all these lenses inside of here are defocusing the light at the exact point at which you're looking at your sample inside of this box is the neutral density filter let's pull that out and talk about that this is the neutral density filter wheel holder so the light that comes out of this Illuminator here there are a couple ways that you could dim this light if you needed to so way number one is you could just send less power to this unit and then the bulb is going to shine less brightly I mean it's basically just an incandescent bulb but the problem with that is that as you give it less power the wavelength distribution changes and so you start getting redder and redder light coming out of this so the more optimal way to do this is to have you know a ton of power just cranking into this thing and then use a neutral density filter set to just to lower that entire wavelength Spectrum down equally let's open this bad boy up and see what we find another little tip anytime I'm disassembling something with you know tiny little screws I like to have a little a little bin or something to hold all these screws so you don't lose them I mean this is you know some specialty tiny screw that would be kind of hard to replace open in this little up let's look inside of this thing you got the wheel and you got this cute little hand hand wheel and look look how they did this so cute this whole bit comes out and it has compliant mechanism on it so that you can press it right over this shaft and you don't need any kind of a bearing or anything it's just has this tiny little these two tiny contact points so there's not a ton of friction I did have to lubricate this thing up at some point you know it turns out after what 20 years of life this thing needed a little bit of lubrication but that's all right just look at the you know look at the attention to detail here I mean this is this is an injection molded part and I mean they could have only made what like somewhere between one and ten thousand of these things and so just imagine making an injection mold for every single one of these intricate little components that's in this microscope I mean the bill of materials this thing must have been insane and then you have this actual filter holder here and to hold these little filters down they're a little threaded you know I don't really know why but it's threaded both internally and externally it's like a bushing so this bushing is holding it down but even just the light complexity inside of this filter wheel holder is pretty incredible after the illumination light goes through the neutral density filters it passes through this little diffusing little plate might be a little hard to see here on camera but there's a little plate on a four a four bar linkage that you can control externally with this little switch you can put it in front take it off this thing is actually really useful I never have that not on but then after that is the the field diaphragm so this is actually a really this is a really important part for for controlling cooler illumination you can see that there's a little Iris inside of this that opens up you know of course it's like a belt on a pulley opening it for some weird reason but anyway um effectively what this field diaphragm does is that it is a known location in the optical train of the microscope so you can close it down so that you can actually physically see the leaves of the iris and you can use that to adjust other parts of the microscope so you can get everything optically aligned properly and then this also lets you effectively close down the total amount of light that's going into your sample so that you don't have extra light going and creating glare where in the spots that you don't need it essentially I flip the microscope around so that I could show you how the the focusing knobs work so the actual there's like a fine focus here there's a course Focus here and the way that it converts between fine course focus is located inside of this component itself I tried to disassemble it to be able to show this component to you but it was all sealed in there I imagine it's probably like a planetary gear set and then that connects to the splined shaft that goes down and then this little part down here is the rotary encoder that it's actually using to detect the rotation of this okay that's a little better there's this little rotary encoder wheel you can't see it but there are microscopic little lines that are on this plastic disc that's getting read by this circuit board here basically just shines a light through it and then it has a detector on the other side and it sees is the light blocked or is it not blocked this is a great opportunity to make use of the micro Safari mobile microscope let's just throw it on here and pinch to zoom and then put it right over the rotary encoder wheel so you can kind of see you can see the lines even with this just pretty inexpensive mobile microscope any of these circuit boards in here that have this little sticker on it are static sensitive Electronics this is the um you know no static don't touch me kind of kind of sticker so basically what you have to do is that you have to wear an anti-static wristband this connects to your body which connects over to the mat and it's physically connected here and then the other side of this is a wire that you then go and plug into something that's Earth grounded so effectively What's Happening Here is that this mat this blue mat and my wristband are connected to Earth ground but through a really high resistance resistor effectively it makes it so that any static electricity goes onto you or the mat and then it flows through to ground but the important part is you don't want it to be a really easy path to ground because then what will happen is that you have this huge current Spike and then it induces other currents near nearby and that's actually really bad too so you kind of want to like very slowly bleed the charge off of static and that's why I can safely be touching all the stuff right now big shout out to the engineers who designed this microscope and they're using torx bits all over the place also known as Star Bits also known as hexolobular bits but it's it's mathematically the best fastener head design I'm sticking by that Robertson I also really like Square drives but anyway they aren't really using Phillips anywhere which is incredible and that's how you know they're really doing it light bounces off of this mirror down here and then comes up through here and enters into the condenser unit which we're going to take out now this thing is on a rack you can move this up and down we're gonna take it take it off and take a look here we are we've made it to the beautiful The Majestic condenser unit this thing is uh this thing is really cool I think this might be one of my coolest things to open up on here you can hear hear the noise of that so that is indicative of there being a motor inside of it you can hear that motor spinning really fast it sounds like it's geared down I do kind of love this little mechanism they have going on so this is like a little flip out lens system for this but there's a little roller bearing on a on the piece of spring steel that's bent and screwed down here and then that's how it indexes to be in just the right spot it's so cute you can see there is a lens down here it looks like a straight piece of glass and then this flip out condenser also has a little lens in it let's open it up Moment of Truth in situations where you have tiny little connectors you don't usually want to take it apart just by pulling yanking the wires you typically want to actually disconnect it using the plastic of the head instead it's a little bit safer of a thing to do I'm just being pretty meticulous and there we go this is the motor that I was talking about hearing earlier this is what controls the little flip out lens dude add but this is kind of a cute little mechanism I'm going to move it from the outside so you can see what's happening this this motor drives a spur gear that's inside of here and then the spur gear is connected to this brass rack and then this brass rack is what is then connected I would imagine to another spur gear that's underneath of this and this does have some glue that's holding these components in here so I'm not going to be able to get this part apart but how does the motor know this isn't a stepper motor this is just uh simply it's a brushed DC motor how does this know when to stop going well there are these two little sensors here and again this is the same thing like what we had in the rotor encoder where there's a light source and then there's a detector right underneath it and then there's this little cute brass flag that it uses to tell when when the moment is to stop and when it should keep going so I don't think that's actually using these sensors to 100 dictate where this is going to mechanically land I think that's the role of this little spring bearing roller setup they have going on here I think these are just simply when to tell the motor to kind of stop going and then at that point it gets it close enough that it'll that the roller bearing will fall into the detail and it'll like align it to exactly the right spot we have the other half of this condenser here the the cable that this thing is can connecting to this metal shielding is getting clamped down with a little metal piece onto the frame of this so this is how the frame of the condenser is getting grounded with the rest of the microscope and it's getting it's also strain relieving all the wires I also just find it pretty amusing how many kind of like bespoke pcbs this microscope has just randomly all over the place like inside of this condenser I have to imagine basically what the circuit board does is that it takes in these button inputs and then also any commands that come through this and then convert it into a signal for the stepper motor driver the stepper motor that's located in here and then on the other side you basically talk to this this motor here and also give it power and stuff like that here's the underside of that PCB in case you're I don't know interested to see that for some reason now we can see all the kind of the the mechanical side of this this assembly so we have this little four wire connector here it's connecting to the stepper motor which is this little bulgy part and I can tell that this is a stepper motor a because there are four wires going to this thing instead of just like two or three and then also when I turn this this gear here you can actually feel the individual steps of the stepper motor so this tiny tiny cute cutest little spur gear it's moving this huge bigger outer gear and then this gear is attached to an eccentric cam which is then driving this roller bearing to move this whole sort of like arm mechanism here this is the pivot point for it so I'm actually just going to do this manually you can see what's happening here this thing moves opens the condenser Iris leaves um and you know the way that they're getting like huge Precision on it is that it's because of the the follower bearing moving along this Ascent eccentric can and then when you move over to this side this thing is spring-loaded right here this little spring which is how this will close back up for you but the actual like the mechanism that's moving this thing is this tiny little distance right here and so all of this this whole like mechanism is a way to transfer the it's a way for letting the stepper motor rotate a lot to move these leaves a really tiny distance so you effectively get more resolution out of each individual step on the stepper motor we're going to take a look at the motorized stage now which is just held on by a couple of screws to what I'm going to call the stage carrier here huge chunk of aluminum all that's just machine and even this little slide holder thing is machined aluminum here you can see if you look really closely you can see all the little Machining marks you know I've noticed that these large flat sections don't really have any visible Machining marks on them it's it's kind of like a just a very flat it's not actually super smooth it has a little bit of a rough texture to it I sort of speculate that they're doing some kind of an anodization process that gives it a little bit more of this rough texture which gives it more of like a slippery surface so that the slide can pretty easily Glide along this this is a pretty simple component overall though it's just two stepper Motors that are controlling the X and the y-axis via a worm drive and then it has two limit switches you can probably hear that here are the two stepper motors with the serial connector that just has the pin outs that directly Drive the motors there's no motor driver or anything inside of this they did add these little manual knobs so that you can move the stage manually without needing to have it engaged and on but because of the stepper motor it'll only set itself at each individual step and so at the res solution you need for microscopy this would be way too coarse of an adjustment for doing anything that's beyond like 100 times my total magnification you should be able to see the two limit switch mechanisms here now there's a little switch clicks and gauges says it's okay I'm done in that direction then it goes all the way this way and then there's a really tiny limit switch that gets triggered on that one so why does stepper Motors need limit switches in the first place well they don't know where they are at any given time and so you have to have some way of telling it okay you've stopped like you're at the end of your travels don't keep going I took this apart and I was incorrect this is not a worm drive this is just a helical Gear with a corresponding helical gear rack that's on a that's on a linear rail I'm I sort of expected that this was going to be a worm drive just because there's such a big gear reduction ratio going on and so it basically means that like you get extra Precision out of each step of the stepper motor similar to what we saw in the condenser earlier but I guess it just turns out that just the micro steps that the stepper motor driver puts into this are enough Precision that you actually need and the reason why this is a helical gear instead of just being a straight gear I'm pretty sure is because it reduces the vibrations in in doing this or it reduces backlash or something in that realm um you know once you're looking at something under a microscope any small imprecision that you can see will will add out the new level to see it under the microscope so that's the purpose and in case you don't know what I mean by backlash if you imagine that your teeth are my my hands here um you know it'll push this way but then when the motor goes back around the other direction it has to like move a small distance before it engages the other two to move it back and so this is a bad thing if you're doing Precision locating of stuff such as microscope slides and stuff under microscope and so you basically just want to eliminate this distance as much as possible so that the teeth are always meshing when you change directions and I'm pretty sure that's uh the main purpose of the helical gear set and then for the noise reduction and vibration mitigation of them being helical gears you can kind of imagine that if you just have like a straight gear tooth every time it engages the next tooth it like kind of hits it a little bit and so if these things are moving fast you can imagine it's like hitting it over and over and over again which causes vibration if you have a helical gear set it's not just like one tooth engaging the other there are actually multiple teeth that are engaged at the same time and it's like a continual transition from one tooth to the next look what I just found somebody hand carved their name and maybe a date into this little uh cowling that was going on to this thing next we have the knob I don't even really know what to call this uh I'm gonna call it the twiddle knobs the thing you've turned and it makes the microscope move around I was thinking that this was going to be a rotary code encoder but it's actually not it's something completely different so this knob has these two what seem to be like steel bushings we take it off of here you can see that there are these two tiny little components right here and right here I think that it's probably some kind of a hall effect sensor it's some it's like magnetically detecting if if I am correct that this is steel then it could be doing this magnetically I'm not really sure to be honest if you think you know in the comments please let me know it's also a little bit unusual that they have these four screws here and I think that the job of these screws they're essentially threading into a captive nut that's attached to the back of this PCB and then they're bottoming out on the aluminum them frame of this and so if you tighten these in they effectively Flex the board up because these two screws are actually clamping the middle section of this board to the frame and so I think that's how they're aligning these sensors is that they tighten these screws to flex the PCB ever so slightly to get these sensors in in really close contact and you can see if you look really closely that these actually the surface of them got marred just a little bit perhaps it like that's the way they did it is you just put it really really close to the sensor and then let it kind of grind itself down so that it's almost like an almost perfect contact with those and now we have the stepper motor box it takes in the input of they call it an MR sensor I don't really know why that was like the twiddle knob thing that we're just looking at and then the XY stage has this big output here and then you give it power and that's that's it at least for my my unit it has you know a bunch of other random ports that you presumably control until their control modules and stuff like that let's give it a little give it a little open hey here it is a bunch of electronics who would have known but the thing I wanted to kind of showcase by opening this box box up is how far the miniaturization of like microcontrollers and motor drivers has come especially kind of spurred Along by the whole 3D printing Revolution I made my own microscoped micro stepping stage with chinstep interpolation using just one of the trinamic stepper motor drivers two of those and an Arduino and it worked great you would need like a little bit more sophisticated of a microcontroller to I think do some of the functions that this thing is also doing but still it's like it's amazing even just in the last 10 15 years how far we've come where it used to take this whole box and now it's you know something that's this big instead it's objective time uh what what does it even to say about this I really want to take it apart I to be honest can't really figure out exactly how to take it apart obviously there's a screw right there but I don't think that actually would enabled me to take it apart I think that this back cap is like press fit in there and there's no obvious way to get it out without destroying it so uh sorry not opening it up uh notable features this thing is spring loaded most microscope objectives are like that that's not that remarkable these are all Acro plan objectives with the exception of the lowest magnification ones just like the two and a half times objective doesn't really need that much correction because it's such a low magnification that you just don't really get that much Optical operation in the first place so I believe this is just an achromatic objective with a planar correction so meaning that it corrects for two colors of chromatic aberration and then it also creates a flat field as you're looking at your sample and then this one is the same thing except that it corrects for three colors instead of just two these are considered pretty fancy objectives out in the microscope world but as far as zeiss's lineup it's actually like one of their lower end models at some point I'd like to make a video where I'd open up a bunch of microscope objectives to see what's inside of them but for now just know that microscope objectives contain a bunch of individual little lenses inside of it that correct for each other's aberrations effectively so the fancier objective the more lenses are going to have inside of it and the more like special geometry that each of the lenses has to correct out as you know the objective turret is motorized but what's really cool is if you zoom in here you can see the tiny little gear that's moving the whole thing so there's a huge gear just on the inside of this lip and it's just a tiny tiny little motor that moves this whole chunky thing both the objective term we have this cowling that you can take off and then there's another one down here which you can also take off and you get to see into the mechanism a little bit more it's still a little a little dark in here so I believe that the reason that these two pieces can come out is that these are replaceable Zeiss will happily sell you a you know 600 dollar replacement of this that has like a you know a polarized filter in it or something like that polarized light microscopy and then same thing with that up here I believe that this is the attachment where you'd be putting like a beam splitter if you're doing epiu illumination also known as reflected light illumination so that would be having the Illuminator here in the very back at the top Shining Light over here and then bouncing going down on your sample and then the reflected light comes back up through so if you look back here you can see that that motor that was driving that whole objective turret and then there's some electronics that do random things can't really see anything up here though I'm trying to get better access into here so you can see the mechanisms took the head off and now I'm going to take this plate off what I find rather amusing is that there's a little little serial Port right here that connects to nothing um I mean this it shows that this is truly a universal microscope that Zeiss has created a platform that they can happily sell you upgrades to that you can slot in I don't know some motorized you know DIC head or something now I take off this nice little stainless plate and there's more of a whole lot of nothing you got some wires kind of floating around here but otherwise you know there's this like little roller bearing this this follower bearing that we've seen before that connects to nothing again probably that there was there's a little slider something that would you can put right here to make it do stuff little connector that seems to go nowhere and what do you know this is also a connector that goes to nowhere I was hoping that once I get this far I'd be able to find another plate that I could take off and then you could see inside to a more direct view of the objective turret some of those Electronics maybe the motor and the gearing and stuff like that but it looks like that is not the case and this is just this we're now at the point where it's back to part of the cast frame here it appears that the subjective turret and the stage carrier is all like one big assembly everything that's this gray aluminum here seemed to be just one big piece separate from the the cast frame of the whole thing in order for me to get this out I would need to go through the back of the microscope and unfasten it from behind here which would involve me taking out all the electronics from the back or at the back of the microscope now I just took these two little plates off and checked this out you pull these out ah look at this it's like a PCI slot like an old graphics card and there are a couple of these too pull them out look at this who what does this do I have no clue if you know let me know in the comments you got another one here too another PCI slot I mean this thing really is truly running Windows you know someday I'd love to reverse engineer this maybe I don't know play Minecraft on it something like that future video potential I'm just going to set the boards up here real quick in case you want to pause the video and try and figure out what these are if you just have no interest in this skip ahead like five seconds I left the attention to detail on these cover plates look at this there's like a compressible metal mesh on the outside of this just to make sure that it's I don't know like a perfect Faraday cage or something you all ready for this take this part out I had to disconnect a bunch of a bunch of connectors on the back here I think this is like a power supply board maybe it's adjusting different voltages and stuff this looks like it's uh for a couple buttons or something and then the main the main item is all this right back here so you got another board what does this do who knows uh this is I think this is like the main circuit board on this thing or at least it's like the motherboard so to speak and then the main processors are probably on those things that slot it into here the problem is that you can so you can see the stepper motor I'll have to give a different camera angle but I can see the stepper motor right here that drives the z-axis but in order to access any of the actual mechanics of that you have to take this entire PCB out and there's so much stuff that's like connected up in here that I would have to remove all these connectors Dismount the PCB and then get it all back together making sure that I don't like plug stuff into the wrong port on accident and then we should be able to see behind to that gray single assembly that I was talking about earlier against my better judgment I took out the PCB and it didn't actually give us any access to taking out that front Brown thing I mean there's this like little spot up here that we now can see through but it doesn't really tell us anything other than it's just the bottom of the stepper motor so that was a fail and it's going to take me a good 30 minutes to get back on but in any case I think I have a better understanding now of how this thing is actually fastened in I think that they're on the other side are some hidden Pocket screws that are how it's holding holding itself in so I'm going to take those out next shout out to this wear a ratcheting screwdriver I I don't actually find this tool to be all that useful but for times like this where I have to get to a little tiny screw in the back of a long chamber man this does this does quite well for itself I think I figured it out they did such a good job color matching these little plastic inserts to the gray of this I didn't even realize this was a separate component this is just a little thing hiding the screw head check it out I was able to get it apart it was indeed just those four screws that were in the secret little pocket locations so look how dusty this thing is underneath the spots that I couldn't get to earlier anyway let's take a close look at the the Bounty that we got get a load of this now we can finally see the objective turret motorized area and all of its beauty uh well at least mostly there's this like circuit board that's still covering stuff and it looks like there again are a bunch of connectors and stuff that would make it pretty challenging it apart but we can see a lot more details on what we could see before here's that tiny motor that's spinning the whole thing around you'll notice that it only has two wires coming off of it which says that it's not a separate motor so it doesn't have any kind of positioning control this just goes one way or another at a certain speed it doesn't know where it is and so this has there has to be some mechanism for them to know which objective is in what spot so I was trying to figure out how they how they actually did that and I think I figured it out and it's actually it's super clever at first I thought there must be like a rotary encoder hidden somewhere in here but that's not the case once you start rotating the objectives check out this little dot here you go to the next one okay now there are two dots now there's one in a different spot so each of these has I believe these are just magnets that are maybe glued or pressed fit into that those spots I think there must be a hall effect sensor on the underside of the circuit board or one of the other circuit boards that's tucked up underneath there that's doing that sensing really neat you can now see how the d10 mechanism works too you have that little follower bearing that goes into a little Groove as it was doing earlier and then now get a good look at the actual gear teeth and how small those really are again it's a tiny little sprocket from this motor that's that's moving this huge gear now if we look at the back of this we can see the mechanism that raises and lowers the the z-axis you got the stepper motor that has a shaft that's running down here into some kind of mechanism that I just don't really know what it is because these screws are are glued into their positions you're I think really not supposed to be unscrewing this thing probably because as you'll notice on the touch screen a little bit later that this tracks resolutions down to I think it was like tens of nanometers or something like that and so this is probably a really high Precision part that they've put together and me disassembling this would almost certainly ruin it so I'm not going to do that what I do want to point out is this interesting two color glue setup that they have over each one of these Fasteners so you can see if somebody has backed it out and then put it back in I also find it kind of surprising that they're using mild steel for this plate you can tell because it's rusting but it is they must have just needed the strength of steel instead of aluminum but I'm the part I'm surprised about is that they didn't use like stainless steel or something like that now if we move up here we can see the stepper motor with a little rubber roller thing that's connected here and this doesn't just seem to be connected to anything I don't really know what this does I do wonder if this is here so that a technician could open the back of the microscope and run this stepper motor manually if they needed to for debugging or something like that or if you know this thing just isn't working that's like one way you could make the microscope usable again also really interesting is that this rotary encoder doesn't have the same little microscopic steps as that other rotor encoder does it's actually like kind of huge the distance that it has to turn in order for it to actually engage you know the black Parts versus the clear parts are pretty wide apart and it's probably because the gear ratio is so insane on this that you know I can rotate this a bunch of times and you can't even really see this thing moving at all which is how they get that crazy like 10 nanometer or whatever it was resolution that this thing can actually move at took the head of the microscope off let's see what's inside it whoop opening it up so the coolest thing about this piece is that there's this this like black paint looking stuff inside of here but it's not paint it's actually sticky when you touch it so I think what this is is that they're expecting that you're going to have any time you're putting like a camera on it you're gonna have this port open as you're putting the camera on So Random dust is going to fly in and instead of letting it land on this optic here which is really sensitive to dust it's going to preferentially stick to the walls of this I thought that was super clever and then also it was a really nice little prism here that they have so this takes the image and then it comes up and it splits the image one going up to the camera and the other going to the eyepieces that's basically it for this section I mean obviously it has eyepieces but there's nothing really that fancy or special about these I mean they are quite nice eyepieces but like mechanically there's nothing all that interesting about them let's talk about the touch screen it this is a computer right so it has to boot up of course I'm mostly just showing this because I know people are going to be curious honestly you can't really do all that much on the touchscreen I would say the most interesting part is this Z position probably I mean look at the look at the sheer number of decimal places on that um oh whoops what's going on oh it's a touch screen I touched it that's why uh but yeah so you can you can admire the great Z resolution you can control to what objective you want um this automatic one is grayed out this doesn't work for me I would assume there's probably a cord a cable that I'm missing going from the back of this microscope over to the to the controller and then XYZ let's see what that even does looks like you can like save the position of the z-axis and then you can change the display brightness and that's that's it so there's not really that much on the touch screen and I think that honestly if you had some of the other modules maybe you had I don't know uh DIC or polarized light or something like that it would give you a lot more options to be able to to adjust those motorized components there are many future projects in store with this one and if you'd like to see that hit that subscribe button if you want to keep watching more videos check this one out this is a great video you should see this one it's great in this box

Channel: Micro Safari

Views: 4,361

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Id: 3qejtzThhn8

Length: 39min 13sec (2353 seconds)

Published: Wed Sep 27 2023