3D printing - AMScope / Canon adaptor, for Barlow telescope lens. (And many others)

[SarahC]

I made an adaptor because the 2x Barlow lens for attaching a camera to a telescope was £12, the equivalent for the microscope was £80 - though not the same company!

Version one took me ages, and followed the contours of the Barlow lens, and caused all sorts of problems to model and didn't fit too well.
That was when version 2 was realised - the diameter of the adaptor mount on the microscope matched the diameter of the Barlow 2x lens screwed into the camera!
It was a much simpler job then of designing a straight tube with a bit extra to screw to the microscope adaptor mount.
I've made a dust cap for it, and 3D printed washers to fine tune the focusing to directly match the eyepiece.

It prints slightly narrower than the Barlow lens so that it can be sanded down in the top 1/3 of the cylinder, to make a slightly rough and very good fitting.
I can put my camera on the adaptor by pushing gently and rotating a little side to side. It comes to rest without any form of wobble at all.
The adaptor that came with the microscope wobbles slightly due to being adjustable for many cameras.

More details an pictures are here:
https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4298615

It takes around 3.5 hours to print everything.

[Sir]

That's really impressive! I have the same microscope and ended up buying the CA-CAN-SLR camera adapter from AmScope which turned out to be rather poor quality. I'm assuming you were looking at the same one, how did your images turn out with this setup?

[SarahC]

The barlow 2x lens loses some contrast in the middle, so I may hunt around for another lens at some point.

The images are as sharp as they are without any lens attached. Although compared to doing photography I'm finding them rather soft at =>800x - that's probably the lenses that came with the scope though, I don't think they're plan apochromat.

I set my 20MP camera to take 8MP RAW images (Canon 7D Mk2 lets you select lower res raw images somehow... I don't think it's just throwing away a Bayer triplet cube every n times) because of the softness - the 20MP was just wasting memory card space.

With them being RAW though - nice 12 bit dynamic range, I'm going to hit them hard with Photoshop to maximise the results quality.

I'll post some fully RAW, and after-processed images today.

Sadly I've dipped my 40x dry lens into immersion oil, so I'm looking online to find out what's a good solvent for it. I've lost a ton of contrast.

[Taryn]

Thanks for sharing this. I also noticed your field filters on thingiverse and those look fantastic! Now I need to decide on what I want more, a new microscope or a 3D printer.

[MichaelG.]

Great stuff, Sarah

It’s wonderful to see people that do not have a full workshop designing good things and 3D printing them.

My ... how things have changed in the last few years !!

MichaelG.

[MicroBob]

Hi Sarah,
to clean you front lens you can use surgical spirits or lighter fuel. Generally the image content of high magnification microscope images is low, just a couple of megapixels.
It is very important to avoid mirror and shutter shock as they blur the images. Some cameras allow shock free release from live view, most don't.
A 3D printer is a great tool for microscope accessories and many more things so 3D modelling is a valuable capability.

Bob