alt Hacker NewsHaving it automatically follow tardigrades is so cool! It sounds like great fun. Did you make the ML model for tracking them?
I've wanted to make this the Openflexure Microscope (https://openflexure.org/projects/microscope/) but it is behind the backlog of all sorts of other things.
Yes, I took an existing vision model that could run at realtime on my laptop, and fine-tuned it with a few hundred manually labelled images of tardigrades.
I don't like the openflexure design at all. I mean... obviously it works for a lot of people, but I just don't want a flexure based stage. I like real 2-axis stages based on rolling bearings, basically cloning the X and Y parts of this: https://www.asiimaging.com/products/stages/xy-inverted-stage...
UC2 is another cool project: https://openuc2.com/ but I found their approach constraining.
Frankly I think you could just buy an inexpensive 3D printer that had an open firmware, and replace the extruder with an objective, a tube, and a camera, and you'd have something up and running cheaper for less time.