This year I attended FOSDEM in Brussels, and I fell in love with the stand where the people from OpenFlexure were showing off their microscope.
A few months later, with some spare time and a 3D printer in need of a project, I gathered all the required bits and bolts from TLab and set aside a weekend for printing and assembly.
The version I built is the V7 Low Resolution, using a Raspberry Pi 3 and a NoIR camera. Once assembled, everything worked out of the box, and we could examine how leaves look at a magnification of 20×.
Don’t hesitate to build one yourself if you’ve always wanted to explore the world at a different scale. Leaves, water, insects — the list of everyday objects that can be observed with this microscope is endless. I uploaded a 3MF project to Printables with all parts distributed across 3 different beds, so they can easily be printed with different colours or materials.
And if 20× isn’t enough for you, you can always start with the High Resolution, or upgrade your low-resolution build with the required parts.