Picroscope: A Digital Raspberry Pi-Based Microscope That You Can Build for Less Than $60

Most people are used to the purely analog optical microscopes that we all used in school. They’re reliable, fairly inexpensive, and easy to find. But, interactive digital microscopes offer a number of features that those don’t: multiple people can view the sample at a time, photos and videos can be easily be recorded, and various computer vision techniques can be used to analyze the feed.

Even consumer digital microscopes can easily cost hundreds of dollars, however. Luckily, you can build the Picroscope for less than $60 if you have access to a 3D printer and standard electronics tools. RiksEddy shows you exactly how to do this in his detailed tutorial, and the results are very nice for the cost.

The brain of the Picroscope is a Raspberry Pi Zero W, which peers at your sample through an Arducam mated with a CCTV lens. The frame is a simple 3D printed assembly. If you don’t have your own 3D printer, the parts can be printed through a service for about $10.

Putting it all together is straightforward, as it’s mechanically very simple. From there, it’s just a matter of loading up the Raspberry Pi with Raspbian in headless mode. The actual video is handled by OpenCV, and the feed is tunneled to your computer through SSH. While this is only capable of 4x magnification, that could certainly be enhanced with more expensive optical lenses.