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Comment by mk_stjames | Hacker News Reader

I want to point out that the Genmitsu 3018 desktop CNC that their $4400 microscope is based on is $330 on Amazon. It's hard not to recognize.

I think one could assemble the remaining optical path and camera for less than the remaining $4070.

Well, I know so, because, I did exactly that several years ago with a telecentric lens form Edmunds and a industrial C-mount camera back and an even cheaper 3018 CNC for automated inspection and archival scanning of PCBs. (telecentric lens due to the boards being populated with components, this helps capture them without focus stacking and without perspective).

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Hi there! CTO of Labsmore here. Pricing is hard :) There is a lot that goes into the final price, especially once the other components, calibration, and overhead is factored in. Its our first time selling a product like this and would love input from others on how they arrive at sticker prices and PMF for commercial products.

Oh absolutely, I just couldn't help pointing out the little detail I noticed; given this is HN an all.

In my opinion, if you've shipped 2 or more units at the given prices... You've actually priced it right for your target market!

We have! And a few larger group buys / enterprise customers in the pipeline. We started out selling more expensive Mitutoyo systems (quality but expensive Japanese optics) and sold a few of those. But feedback from customers was that if we could do 80% of what that system does and get it on a credit card it would be very interesting to them (greatly simplifies purchasing flow). But at the same time distributors don't want to carry them because they loose margin over selling $30-200k comps which means we need to adapt more of a "DTC" approach than we were originally planning. So working on upping our sales / marketing game.

In my experience, for products that aren't medical devices, fighter jets, etc. The rule of thumb is 30-40%. 30-40% of the final cost to the customer is what you should be shooting to have your COGS leaving your factory.

Thanks! Yeah that's roughly inline with our calculations / how we priced things.

If we want to get the final price lower we need to switch to more basic components or tighter integration with suppliers. But we've been avoiding that under our premise having a system that can be purchased with a company credit card (say 5k or 10k limit) is the main requirement. Would love more feedback on how important that is for people's purchasing decisions. And even then if we lowered the cost of the chassis we might instead use that to improve the optics/camera following the "credit card purchase" philosophy.

I just picked up some Opto-E telecentric lenses with this exact idea in mind. (That plus possibly scanning microfiche so I don't have to mess with focus.)

If I can do it on a small scale with my long-suffering Ender 3 (which keeps getting weirder and weirder stuff stuck to it), then transplanting it to a larger motion platform is trivial.

What did you do for software?

I wrote a python script that sent G-code to step the machine in a grid via the USB-serial link, and then take photos that I later stitched with a script using OpenCV.

I think I spent more time trying to make a little tk-inter GUI for it ... that I never actually used because I all did was step in a regular grid pattern at a fixed speed... than everything else combined, and that included printing a combo ring light/lens holder-to-spindle-adapter to mount the lens in the CNC.

It was a fun single-day project. Seems like I should have started a company selling them.

Have you come across these type of things https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001351566621.html that appear to behave like a metallurgical microscope.

I'm kind of tempted. I assume the objectives aren't infinity corrected?

Just found - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_IWTq-TSiU which shows something similar. It looks like there's a ring that seems to adjust magnification on it, unless I'm mistaken.

I've got a DIY XY stage and would like to attach something like that too it, to image large objects (I've got a BHM microscope but the stage has only a small degree of movement).

Edit: Just noticed the objectives used are infinity corrected

> https://www.aliexpress.com/item/4001351566621.html

Ah yes, there, you found the other component to pair with the cheap 3018 cnc platform. :-)

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