Light microscopy and adaptive optics, my uncensored and biased opinions

About once a week I am asked by my colleagues which 3D modeling software I am using - usually when I am staring at the new part being 3D printed. I am using  Autodesk Inventor for a few reasons: it is a professional software for engineers and has huge community around it it provides free academic license there are thousands of youtube videos with detailed tutorials by enthusiasts easy to learn at a basic level, but there is always a lot of room for growth In a lab, there are two main workflows where Inventor is necessary: 3D modeling of complex assemblies (like custom-built microscope) and 3D printing. There are many youtube tutorials for beginners , so I here only review some things that Inventor can do, without any specific instructions.  3D modeling of parts and assemblies Before building a new microscope, you can create its virtual model and check dimensions, required adapters, and whether things will fit together. Luckily, Thorlabs has 3D model of near...

After I discovered the OpenStage project for cheap DIY microscopy stage automation, I decided to add a twist to it - control the stage positions manually with a rotary encoder, in addition to already-implemented serial port (USB). I found a nice RGB illuminated rotary encoder from Sparkfun  - it's shaft works as a button, and it is internally illuminated by built-in 3-color LEDs - a perfect device to switch speeds and manually control the stages. Hooking it up to Arduino seemed easy, and there is a very nice Encoder library to do just that. But when I started to test it, I fell into a deep rabbit hole called 'debouncing'. In short, real-world switches are never perfect and the 'moment' of switching has many messy things happening between the two leads, creating noise in the logic of reading device (Arduino). So, the voltage readout from a real rotary encoder looks like this: Note the high-frequency chirp in yellow line when it falls from high to low. T...