Made a mount for a USB microscope (Supereyes B005 28$ Amazon) that will also hold pens.
It attaches to the DW-611 spindle mount on my X-Carve.
I used black nylon to make it at Shapeways and it cost under 8$.
I used an M4x0.70 hand threading tap on the three holes on each ring and used M4 bolts to align the camera vertically.
I’ve made this available for download at Shapeways and Thingiverse.
@J_DuaneNorthcutt Download links?
Dang, nice! Do you have the thingverse link handy? I could go look for it, but I’m kinda’ lazy… lol
Going to have my friend print one of these up for me, this looks really handy!
Very nice. Do use the mount to hold a microscope?
I use this microscope with it – http://www.amazon.com/Supereyes-B005-Microscope-Endoscope-Magnifier/dp/B0066HA1PU
That is very cool, but what do you use the microscope for?
I’m working on automatic alignment and zeroing using optical sensing.
Me, I just want to be able to use it with a known offset as a zero reference. Being able to precisely zero my X and Y would take it up another solid notch of precision.
Optical alignment would be very useful, but how do you deal with the fact that the camera is offset from the bit.
If I wanted to align the bit on the corner of my work the camera would be looking down on the wasteboard. Do you just align the bit normally to the corner and then make a mark on the wasteboard in the crosshairs of the camera?
Edit –
I was just looking at some Youtube videos and found this. So I may have misunderstood your process. Are you using the camera to find the corner and then home the spindle based on the known offset in X and Y?
This is even slicker! The optical system looks for markers on the material and then automatically compensates for how the material is sitting relative to the X/Y axis of the machine. Just clamp your work anyway you want without even trying to square it to the machine.
The “known offset” method is what I’m planning, since I can use the microscope to aim at a designated point (on the corner, a mark on the material, etc, depending on what I’m doing) then send the correct offset, and have my zeros down to a very high level of precision.
I want to mount a microscope to get into microscopy, microscopic photography. I plan to write a program, maybe in Python, to send GCode to the XCarve to move the microscope to a new position, capture the current microscope image and save it, and repeat. The end result would be a grid of images that could be combined with Microsoft’s ICE Software into megapixel or even gigapixel images of flat surfaces, like printed circuit boards for example. Preview of ICE’s Structured Panorama Feature
Nice one! I bought a microscope attachment for my iPhone which turns it into a digital microscope from proscopedigital.com. Works great!
