cross-posted from: https://slrpnk.net/post/43551913

After reading the article about 31 New species discovered in 2 weeks of exploration, it was mentioned that they used a microscope, known as Squid,which is an open-source, confocal microscope

From their site:

What is Squid?

Squid is a quantitative imaging platform with a full suite of hardware and software components and configurations for deploying facility-grade widefield microscopes at a fraction of the cost of commercial solutions. Developed with the goal of helping translate the rapid advances in the field of microscopy and microscopy-enabled methods, including those powered by deep learning, we envision Squid will simplify roll-out of microscopy-based applications - including at point of care and in low resource settings, make adoption of new or otherwise advanced techniques easier, and significantly increase the available microscope-hours to labs.

Significance

Manual microscopy has served as a bedrock for the diagnostics of various infectious diseases, although at a cost of tedious labor and human errors. Imagine looking for 1 to 5 parasites amongst 5 million red blood cells. Currently, microscopists can take up to 10-15 minutes to review a single slide. Automated robotic microscopes are poised to enable a new era of smart field microscopy but current platforms remain cost prohibitive and largely inflexible, especially for resource-poor and field settings.

github repos
CAD models linked available here (a lot of google links there (docs, drive, etc))

tags frugal science microscopy tracking fluorescence excitation patterned illumination instrumentation frugal science malaria