BrickScope: RMS threaded 8x10 stud brick

Building a microscope isn't that difficult, and there are many tools and resources available for this, but it can seem a bit daunting for the beginner, especially when it comes to the optics. To make this a bit more accessible, we wanted to to make something flexible and adaptable that makes experimenting with basic microscope optics quick and easy. Using construction toy bricks (such as lego) for structural parts of the microscope should make alignment and stability easier when playing about with the optics.

This design forms part of this system. The excellent OpenFlexure microscope (https://openflexure.org/) showed that optical threads can be reliably printed using FDM printers. so this design integrates a standard microscope lens thread (RMS) into an 8x10 stud brick that is compatible with Lego and other Lego-compatible bricks.

To complete a microscope, you need a finite conjugate RMS threaded lens, a camera/sensor, and some bricks to put some distance between the two. The lenses can be found online (there's lots of old, cheap RMS objectives on ebay, for example). Finite conjugate lenses need no additional optics, but infinite conjugate lenses need an additional tube lens, so I'd recommend a finite conjugate lens for simplicity. Finite conjugate lenses have a specified tube length (e.g. 160mm), but you can use them with shorter tubes - magnification and working distance will change, and image quality will drop, but it should still offer usable performance. Changing the distance from the lens to the camera is a good starting point for experimentation!

We will be adding designs for camera/sensor mounts to use with this lens mount once we have them tested, along with more details for microscope configuration and assembly.

This design centers the optical axis midway between the 4th and 5th stud, but the alignment during design was approximate, so may be slightly off.