What will re-invented microscopy mean for Manufacturing?

 As a specialist hydraulics manufacturer, Sarum Hydraulics is surprisingly excited about any advance in mobile microscopy.  From looking at finishes and watching hydraulics at work to characterising contamination, microscopes continue to prove themselves invaluable during the day to day running of our shop. They are just a great tool.

Around the workshop though, you can forget a traditional optical microscope. With eyepieces to twiddle and often crude USB connections required to download images to the nearest laptop, these contraptions are certainly not designed for busy people in a working environment (and even less so if anyone in the workshop is a bit clumsy!) Like a lot of people who don’t see themselves as scientists, we simply don’t want to spend hours mucking around with a fussy, complicated piece of kit. Instead, we want our ‘scope to show us exactly what we are looking at plus be able to instantly download a nice clear image for our records or report. Luckily for us, there are lots on the market and mighty useful they are too, subject to a few limitations on current offerings.

We have been following two groundbreaking mobile microscope products with particular interest.

First up is the Foldscope from the good old U.S of A. This “origami microscope” is a dramatically cheap, wonderfully simple and so we are told, high powered unit which could be on course to have a massive impact on diagnostics in the developing world. Whilst the unit is dependant upon manual X and Y adjustment with all images viewed by eye (i.e. non downloadable), at the right price, this has got to be quite some product. Developed by Stanford, Sarum Hydraulics are excited as to where it will play its part in the big push to eradicate some very nasty diseases. Cheap, clever, small and light, whilst the Foldscope is not sophisticated enough for our worksopshop use due to its limited display capabilities and lack of digital technology, this innovative little microscope could make serious waves for medical professionals across the developing world.

Another cost effective method of displaying microscopic images and videos comes in the form of the innovative wireless connected microscope from new kids on the block, ioLight. A growing company but with some serious scientists behind the technology.

ioLight’s slick wireless ‘scope produces high definition images and videos, available to download straight from your tablet or Smartphone to your report. That is what we call easy.

Neatly removing the need for wretched cables and featuring motor driven X & Y stages straight from your device, you don’t have to fumble around with fingers on thumbwheels. The ioLight microscope promises cutting edge images that draw upon super-sophisticated mobile phone optics to challenge the quality of rather serious and expensive traditional laboratory counterparts. At the size of a super compact camera, for what we need, the ioLight ‘scope could be perfect. At Old Sarum we will certainly be using this innovative little microscope as soon as it hits the shelves.

What might be around the corner on applications for an ioLight microscope? We can’t speculate on biology or education which we suspect is a big area for it. However, we are excited on Quality Control and contamination analysis for the hydraulics industry. The combination of miniature high quality microscope optics in a connected unit plus third party analysis software might even generate a technique that rivals mainstream laser particle counters for contamination monitoring.

Will there be a lot more people seeing the light in optical microscopy? Sarum Hydraulics can’t wait to see (literally) what happens next.

Find us at https://sarum-hydraulics.co.uk/

ioLight’s Crowdcube page, as well as their excellent introduction video can be found here.

For further information on FoldScope, please visit http://www.foldscope.com/