DIY Stack and Stitch System

Entropy512 wrote:

Nice!

Trinamic stepper drivers have become extremely popular with the 3D printing community.

FYI a similar project hit Hackaday a few days ago - https://hackaday.com/2019/06/14/gigapixel-microscope-reveals-tiny-parts-of-the-big-picture/

Thanks.

Yes they seem popular with 3D crowd, at least 2200 types and earlier versions. I even thought about using the 3D community software and hardware developments (really great stuff) but decided that I would have to adapt to their way of doing things for massive Stack & Stitching Sessions, rather than the way I initially wanted, so ended up rolling my own.

I've done near gigapixel level (~240000 by ~20000) chip images for a couple years now. One of the early sessions was 19 tiles at 300~400 36MP images per tile, a total of more than 200 gigapixels initially. These initial gigapixel type levels were done manually in X and Y with automated Z axis, and took many days....why I decided to develop a fully automated setup!!

The project over on Hackaday is very interesting, great for starters to get involved and seems straight forward.

The wood platforms and the linear rails used will need to yield to higher levels of precision, stability, and repeatability to get close to the resolutions mentioned.  Most folks in higher precision and resolution stacking use precision rails and microscope objectives. Also it's usually better to move the camera/lens/subject in the Z axis rather than the usual in camera focus when you move to higher magnifications beyond ~2X for the best IQ. So not only the mechanical, electromechanical and electronics, but the optics can get quite involved. With stacking and stitching then telecentric optics become an important factor for consideration if subject distortion is important.

Some of the commercial offerings from Wemacro and Stackshot are pretty good for those that don't want to DIY for Z axis stacking, but for very high precision work you'll need to move to the industrial type rails.

Anyway, fun stuff indeed!! Thanks for posting.

Best,