ucam: turn a $10 webcam into a microscope

[Mackenzie Cowell]

On Sunday some boston folks got together and we hacked on cheapo usb webcams to turn them into microscopes, a la hackteria (http://hackteria.org/wiki/index.php/DIY_microscopy)

It works amazingly well.

Details with photos and video here: http://diybio.org/2009/12/13/webcam-microscope-hacks-at-bosslab/

I'd love to hook the hacked camera up to a makerbot or other cheap 3-axis controlled platform.  Total cost minus laptop was $15 or so.

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[Simon Quellen Field]

I did this in my book Return of Gonzo Gizmos about six years

ago:

"http://sci-toys.com/scitoys/scitoys/biology/micro.html#video2"

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[Vaishnavi Ananth]

A  similar story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html?_r=2

"an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes. “We convert cellphones into devices that diagnose diseases,” said Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, who created the devices. He has formed a company, Microskia, to commercialize the technology"

2009/12/15 Simon Quellen Field <sfi...@scitoys.com>

[Mackenzie Cowell]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2009 at 12:47 AM, Vaishnavi Ananth <vaish...@gmail.com> wrote:

A  similar story:

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html?_r=2

"an engineer, using software that he developed and about $10 worth of off-the-shelf hardware, has adapted cellphones to substitute for microscopes. “We convert cellphones into devices that diagnose diseases,” said Aydogan Ozcan, an assistant professor of electrical engineering and member of the California NanoSystems Institute at the University of California, Los Angeles, who created the devices. He has formed a company, Microskia, to commercialize the technology"

“Instead you capture holograms of all the cells on the slide digitally at the same time,” he said, so that it’s possible, for example, to see immediately the pathogens among a vast population of healthy cells. “It’s a way of looking quickly for a needle in a haystack,” he said.

Anyone know what particular technique he is talking about?  There are some pretty neat ones described in in the literature.

http://scholar.google.com/scholar?q=Aydogan%20Ozcan&lr=&sa=N&hl=en&tab=ts