Over $3K for a similar setup from Thor Labs (1). Wow, you can buy everything here including the 3D printer for that. Good work!
1: https://www.thorlabs.com/michelson-interferometer-educationa...
1: https://www.thorlabs.com/michelson-interferometer-educationa...
It sort of depends on what your goal is; personally, I live to see something expensive on Thorlabs, and make a simplified, less accurate, and far cheaper alternative in my home lab. But that's rarely how folks in labs do it- instead, they will focus on getting people to be useful for performing state of the art research, which usually depends on applying hundreds of years of experience to make some tiny marginal improvement, which frequently depends on having extremely precise and accurate gear.
I think there's just such a huge middle ground that's missing (for funny historical reasons[1]) between "children's toy" and "lab-grade equipment" especially in optics, which is why I was excited to make this my first foray into making a fully 3d printed "useful-ish" thing that doesn't really exist otherwise.
---
[1] This is because most lab equipment was made _in the lab_ back in the 60s or so, and having this technical ability was a huge advantage for many labs. Now, personnel cost/hours are much more expensive relative to equipment, so people will pretty much pay whatever to get lab-grade stuff.
I agree there is a huge middle ground- for example, I make hobby microscopes at home, and much of my work has been making accurate and precise 2D/3D stages. It's easy to buy great, simple (non-motorized) scopes with good optical quality, but as soon as you start adding motorized stages, or any sort of complicated illumination or filtering, it gets challenging quickly. My actual goal is to track microbes in real time using computer vision, but the professional hardware to do so is out of my price range.
I have spent literally thousands of hours fiddling with one part or another Today, I'm working on a high speed flash illuminator that is coupled to the camera, and it's one problem after another. Reality has a fractal level of detail.
Since I haven't been able to look at your project yet, I don't know if you worked on this area, but I found it really useful to clone the Thorlabs cage system components: https://www.thorlabs.com/optical-cage-systems and specifically https://www.thorlabs.com/item/CXY2A (you can download their 3D model and see that the mechanism isn't that complex).
Another thing I've ended up doing is prototyping in plastic and then having it machined at a place like JLCPCB out of aluminum. PLA is just flexible enough (especially under load) that it can make the results very frustrating.
Yes this is very cool (hope you make it open source :) but have you taken a peek at the openflexure project? They make a fully motorized 3-axis microscope that is 3d printed and relatively inexpensive (parts+motors+electronics - PLA net out to USD 250?)
it’s very cool! maybe you can also take some ideas from there :)
It's pretty close to the Thorlabs Cerna, https://www.thorlabs.com/cerna-r-series-modular-microscopy-s... although I just do low-magnification light microscopy.
The current system I am building is mainly optimized around scanning large areas quickly; I have already demonstrated that I can create accurate stitches by moving, stopping, taking photo, repeat, but it's slow (due to the stopping) so I am working on an approach that keeps the stage moving constantly, but triggers a bright flash that freezes intermediate exposures. This gives a good 10X speedup over the simpler model of move/stop/photo/repeat but brings in a number of other challenges.
good luck! are you posting updates anywhere?
so yes, we _also_ (back in my phd lab) built equipment in that sense, but there was a pretty good foundation of Fairly Fancy stuff already sitting around !
I mean, it's practically the most basic optical experiment that you can perform. Nobody needs to pay $3K to learn how an interferometer works. It's not a MoT or something exotic like that, it's a beam splitter and a couple of mirrors.
Put another way, it's the difference between building a Heathkit and putting a bunch of parts together that you salvaged from other stuff, for those who are old enough to grasp that analogy.
If you are putting together some more advanced educational or experimental apparatus, they are pretty much a no-brainer supplier, as you say. But their level of quality, support, and system integration just isn't necessary for something like this.
that one has uhh substantially less drift for what it's worth, but reprinting in more stable material would help that a ton (and still be quite cheap!)
There's a balance that has to be struck between: 1) Equipment that's so perfect that students learn nothing about the effort to get an experiment working. 2) Or so crappy that it's an obstacle to learning anything at all.
Also, the crappy-ness is multiplied by 30 for the number of setups needed for a class of 60 students, assuming they work in pairs.
Oh, the crappy oscilloscopes. They were cheap "student scopes" and their controls were worn out, so they behaved erratically. Since then I've met other people who took freshman physics lab, and they remember the "oscilloscope lab" with disgust.