Vivaruim build

I've had a terrarium for years and it all started from one of those Venus fly traps you buy from Walmart in the summer.  The venous fly trap eventually died but I decided to keep the hard plastic container to see if anything else would come to life.  And with a little patients it eventually did the peat moss around the Venus fly trap sprung to life and took over the container but let's fast forward about 15 years.  The plastic container started to die due to sun exposure so I decided to swap the container for a large pickle jar.  I decided to remove 90% of the peat moss due to it having negative effects on growth.  I also increased the water level by 30% making the original soil extremely moist.

I brought in several different species of moss and lichen and plants to create more competition for the peat moss. Also added a piece of tree bark to add dry surface and soil coverage.

•peat moss

•small unknown plants (waiting for more growth)

•reindeer lichen

•Tree Bark (Male Persimmon) 

To keep the moss and lichen from over taking the new container I decided to add some isopods and snails. I wanted this to be a self-regulated biosphere. I know isopods like both a dry and wet area so I decided to design a small hideaway for them to explore during the day. 

The structure was 3d printed with grey PLA at 100% infill to stop any possible warping by heat. Long term hope is that the the mosses eventually over take the structures roof allowing it to blend in with the rest of the terrarium. One end of the hideaway is open and the other is closed with a piece of rock moss and reindeer lichen. Some small rocks were added for other areas to hide and explore. The hope is that the moss takes up most of the open soil,  I believe this will eliminate or decrease the amount of sitting water.

I will update periodically with updated photos of the growth and life I discover in the Vivarium. If you enjoyed this reading check out my custom lighting I built for it.

Laser Mount for Telescope

A few years ago while walking around Good Will I found a cheap telescope . It wasn't anything fancy just a 15-20 year old refracter,  they only wanted $5 for it so I picked it up.

It sat in the closet for a while,  it needed alot of TLC. All the bolts needed to be replaced and everything was simply to loose. There was to much play to make it a useful scope. Luckily all the new bolts and washers removed all this slack.

 

Unfortunately someone probably years ago removed the "finder scope". Which make it easier to align up to the object you want to examine. To solve this issue I decided to mount a semi high powered laser I had laying around.

Originally I decided I was going to attach it using velcro straps but I eventually mounted it using adhesive.

I didnt expect it to be perfectly aligned, it was pretty obvious even a small angle difference would effect the alignment of the scope and the laser.

If it got me close to the location of the object I was trying to view , I would consider the project a success.

Overall I consider the project a success.

Fecal Examination Microscope Slide

Quick project 

A few months ago I had a friend approach me about the idea of examining the fecal matter of a goat to see if the goat had worms by looking for eggs. After some research I found out they do manufacture such a slide, but I thought they were a tad expensive. The design is relatively simple with it mostly being a counting square in the center wedged between two slides.

I took a microscope slide and as close as possibly engraved a counting square in the center of the slide. After it was done to make it more visible I filled the engraving with blue ink.

To to create a space in between the two slides I simply broke the a slide into multiple pieces and sanded to the needed size.

A small drop of adhesive holds the two pieces in place. Decided to add an 3d printed casing to the ends to hide all my ugly glueing.

This slide probably won't work as well the official version but if it works well enough for me to count eggs then it did its job well.

Thanks for reading 

Simple Camera Fiber Optic interface (Hardware)

I wanted to build a simple interface for viewing the light coming through a fiber cable. This project is part of a larger project involving modifying a spectrophotometer which is a work in progress. But this post is just about designing and building a custom rig for grabbing the light from fiber. Now I'm only interested at the moment in the visible spectrum so this didn't have to really complicated. I essentially wanted to use an off the shelf webcam to view the light. Luckily a company I worked for years ago gave me some webcams so this part was easy.

I ended up using a Genius 120 degree webcam because it was the easiest to build case around and the focus method was very well built. Choosing this webcam really wasn't a great idea in the end because turns out its a pretty expensive webcam with a new one coming to about $150 and used being about $50. Which meant if I broke something I pretty much had to design a new case but ohh well. Either way the webcam fit well into the case that I designed in Sketchup

I built a wire holder into the case and even went ahead and filled the hole with epoxy because I'm not really a big fan of self destructive projects.

The lid ended up being an odd shape because I started trimming down on where the plastic needed to be and these trimmings also cut like 2 hours off the print time. 

The main area where the fiber optic cable inserted had to about 11 mm thick to get the end of the fiber directly above the lens. 

On the inside of the lid I did add small area above the lens because the lens extended above the case by about .5mm. Not a big deal I just wanted to be safe. 

At this point of the build I hadn't realized that centering the two bolts was a bad idea (dumb mistake). Obviously when the two bolts are inserted the box won't be able to sit on a table evenly. It will constantly rock back and forth. I should have made it 4 bolts and put one on each corner or another option would could have been designing the lid to insert into the box. My solution to this problem was to print an attachment for the bottom adding legs to the design. I grabbed my cheap desktop laser and cut out some soft feet.

The next part of this project is to write some code to take the data from the webcam and pinpoint it to a specific wavelength but that's still a work in progress.  Here is a video of the output from the camera Fiber optic line

Thanks for reading 

UPDATE AUGUST 14

Still working on the software but also had redesign the lid. The orginal version required you too slightly modify the optical cable which just seemed like the wrong direction if your 3D printing the project.  I also wanted to give the camera a little more clearing room under the lid so I expanded the the design upward by about 2mm.

Decided to go ahead and remove the IR filter on the camera. At first it seemed a little to risky but the idea of being able to see a little more of the spectrum really pushed me over the edge. My biggest worry was scratching some of the lower layers but didn't seem to be an issue.  I do think a might have lost some of the  focus but I think it was worth it.

Mars Topography Display

The idea of terraforming Mars has been on my mind and probably many other peoples. It will probably become a realistic event but I don't expect it to a finished idea for another 100 or so years. Because of this, the idea of Terraforming can only be displayed in our minds and art. 

Luckily the nice people at NASA provide so many lovely photos of mars which is where my idea started. I choose this area of Mars because it has several nice craters and would make good topography.

I decided to turn the photo into a grey scale and increased its contrast in hope to bring out some of the details. Although now I know I could have used Fusion 360 to convert this to a 3d printable file at the time of this project I choose to use an online application called Selva3d. Their website allowed me to upload the photo and allow me to pick out certain dimensions and thicknesses. Luckily the website offered a free option and honestly it worked perfectly. 

3D Printing

I wanted to print 3 copies of the landscape each representing a different stage of Terraforming.

1.Current Mars

2.Mars after Green House effect creating lakes of water (100 years)

3.Plant life occurs and Lakes become permanent (150-200 years)

Just because of convenience I printed each landscape in Black PLA and gave a light sanding to remove any strings. 100% infill because I usually print every like that.

The Ender 3 Pro did an amazing job at printing. 

Painting 

All of the prints were painted a pumpkin orange. The all of the  topographies were given a dry brush of brown just to increase dimension so you could easily see the craters and low areas.

The second one got slightly green tone added to areas were I believed lakes and rivers were most likely. The orginal pumpkin orange was still majority and gave the idea that climatic changes were occurring but yet to be critical to the overall environment. The lakes and rivers were created using clear epoxy. I wasn't to worried about removing the bubbles or artifacts from the epoxy they added to the topography.

The third one got the same effect and again got painted pumpkin orange but most got covered with green. The green for the most part was to represent the growth of plant life and the establishment of ecology. I thought it was best to leave some of the orange because mars will probably always have it in some place on the planets surface. I also darkened all the lakes with a dark blue and green to give it a little color. Although on mars the oceans might not end up these colors.

All the landscapes were given semi gloss finish and displayed as it shows below

I hope you enjoyed my write up

Thanks for reading 

Insect lenses and Spectroscopic Analysis

Examining the Spectral Signature of Insect Lenses (Visible Spectrum)

I wanted to examine specific wavelengths that are able to pass through the lens of insect eye.The plan was to choose eight Missouri insects : Honeybee, Red Paper wasp, Cicadas, Common Sand dragon, Green Mantis,Green Stripped Grasshopper,Reddish Brown Stag Beetle. I humanely collected (mostly found dead) each sample and dissected each specimen for the eye structure and preserved each sample in a non-alcoholic resin. Each sample was roughly 0.3-0.5 mm in size when preserved in the resin. I mostly choose this size to both test my ability of specifically cutting the lenses to a size and this size completely covers the viewing area at the desired magnification. 

This post is mostly about the technical build and not about the study of the lenses although Ill post some of that data in the end for some insects tested.

Light source

The light source used was an array of white LEDs which had good spectral variance and could cover the wavelengths that I wanted to focus on.

Monitoring the wavelengths

So I decided to kinda cheat at this and use an off the shelf sensor for detecting and monitoring the intensities of the wavelengths other than using a broad spectrometer . Sparkfun produces a board called the AS726 Visible Spectrum breakout board. I purchased both the Visible and the NIR but for this I only used the Visible because thats mostly what the light source is focused on.

The Visible spectrum board has good wavelength variety, 450,500,550,570,600,650 nm. For my project this gives me enough information . Using a spectrometer would have opened up what wavelengths I could monitor but the breakout board takes away a lot of possible software issues and I like the idea of being in control of the code.

Microscope Attachment

The breakout board needed some form of case to properly attach to the microscope. So to try something new I decided to give Tinkercad a shot and I thought it came out great.

All of the prints were printed in Black PLA. In hope to stop any stray light

I designed a wire guide into the casing to length the life span of the project. The wiring leads to a male USB because the AS726 only needs four wires as it uses I2C communication. This leads to a female USB which is attached to a Arduino Mega as the image shows below. I can easily attach either of the breakout boards without having to rewire the Arduino. 

If you hook up both the NIR and the Visible light sensors like above ^ this gives you 12 wavelengths to monitor and play around with . Hypothetically you could possibly use this type of setup to examine micro custom lens and filters. I have plans on attempting to build lenses that block specific wavelengths and hopefully that will be another post in the future.

 

Insect Lens Data

So below is a few data samples I got from the setup

Resin Sample 

Blank Slide Sample 

Honeybee Sample

Grass Hopper

Green Mantis

   Thanks For Reading

I hope you enjoyed it !!

Links :

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14351

https://www.sparkfun.com/products/14347

Dark field Microscopy

One of the well documented projects that I use very often when examining objects under the microscope are Dark field adapters.Dark field adapters simply stop light from directly interacting with the sample you are examining. The only light that will interfere with the sample is the light coming through the glass at a horizontal. This effect will bring details that would normally not be visible especially with samples that are not transparent.

                            I simply measured the area above the light source under my microscope and designed it to fit. I designed 3 different sizes  mostly to experiment to see what ones are more useful. Turns out it all depends on the size of the sample I have found that the light interferes differently so having multiple sizes worked out in my favor. The adapters were all 3d printed with Black PLA with one exception being the .5 mm blocker, my printer for some reason didnt like printing at the detail I wanted so I had shapeways print it for me and it came out great.

So to finish this off my wife and found a mite in one out terrariums so decided to check it out under the micoscope. Now a mite really isnt transparent so dark field really helped showing us the details needed in identifying the species.