Design of a low-cost and fully automated digital microscope system

Microscopes are indispensable devices of laboratories. They are widely used in industry and science, such as medicine, geology, biology, chemistry and so on. Thanks to the developing technology, manual microscopes are leaving their place to automatic systems. However, automatic microscopy systems are difficult to obtain due to their high costs. The best way to circumvent this problem is to reduce device costs as much as possible. Based on this idea, a fully automated digital microscope system (FADMS) has been proposed as a low-cost prototype. The FADMS can scan and autofocus for various microscopic samples. In addition, it can be controlled over the internet thanks to a developed software and can store scanned microscopic images. The total cost of the developed system is around 2500 US dollars. In experimental studies, mechanical motion sensitivity and focusing tests of the FADMS were performed …