A 3D Printed Microscope Made in Under Three Hours

At the University of Strathclyde, in Glasgow, Scotland, a team of scientists has embarked on a crazy challenge to produce their own equipment at an unbeatable cost – less than £50 or around $63. This microscope has a body that was entirely 3D printed, as were the lenses, using an SLA machine and transparent resin. A project that could well transform access to a diagnostic tool that remains very expensive today. But is its quality up to scratch? What can we expect from this kind of 3D printed equipment?

In the medical sector, additive manufacturing is widely used to design custom-made prostheses, anatomical models in preparation for surgery, implants, cutting guides and tools of all kinds. However, it is still rare to see diagnostic equipment made using 3D printing. Although this is not the world’s first 3D-printed microscope, it is probably the first such large-scale tool designed specifically for medical analysis. Researchers at the Scottish university downloaded a publicly available model from OpenFlexure. They added a camera, a light source and a Raspberry Pi.

The OpenFlexure website includes several microscope models (photo credits: Flickr / OpenFlexure)

The 3D-printed microscope uses a single lens, with a magnification of 2.9x and a numerical aperture of 0.07. That’s not very high for a microscope, but its resolution is good enough to perform reliable diagnostics at low cost.