An open-source combiner for inexpensive laser diodes

Scientific-grade lasers are incredibly costly components of modern microscopes. Inexpensive laser diodes are much cheaper, often less than $100, but they have high divergence and an asymmetrical intensity profile, which makes them difficult to efficiently couple into single-mode optical fibers. Instead, they are coupled into multimode fibers, which results in the appearance of laser speckles […]

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A step-by-step guide to building a prism-type TIRF microscope

Total Internal Reflection Florescence (TIRF) Microscopy is a technique used to observe a very thin region of sample directly at the surface of an interface (coverslip) without obtaining background interference from the rest of the sample volume. Dalton Gibbs, Anisa Kaur, Anoja Megalathan, Kumar Sapkota, and Soma Dhakal have published a wonderful paper entitled “Build Your Own Microscope: Step-By-Step […]

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More DIY Optical Shutters

Several months ago we wrote a short write up about making a cheap optical shutter out of a hard drive disk controlled via Arduino. Since then we have had two Uniblitz shutters fail. We have now seen 6 Uniblitz shutters seen fail relatively quickly, with different users and different use conditions, over three labs. Even […]

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