Hey there!
I have received a Seeed Studio UC2 for the purpose of testing and giving feedback on it. While reading up on the capabilites i figured it would make sense to share my first steps - with no experience in either scientific microscopy or deep knowledge of the components used.
Might want to connect as i figured Jena is just an hour drive from where i live and have my little makerspace.
let this thread begin!
Flashlight
First thing i noticed is the unbearable LED Flashlight that is shipped with the device. Made me wonder why there is no cube with programmable LEDS yet - especially since this could get ultra violet light into the mix, which might be interesting. Looking into the according LEDs and will try to design a block that is insanely bright and thus compliments the cameras chip well.
Automation
My first experiments will be to automate a sequence of different depths inside a sample - with the goal of later putting together a somewhat 3D sample of water samples for later AI training.
This is crude at this point and as stated before i have no idea where this will lead me.
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Hey @theygavemeFIRE, thanks for reaching out and welcome to the microscopy community. Once you have started digging into the rabbit hole it’s hard to find out again 
Let me answer your points.
Flashlight
Indeed, the Flashlight is not the best option to work with. In fact, optically it’s decent, since it provides a “Koehler Illumination”, but it’s not automated and also has this funky flickering effect that causes stripes due to the rolling shutter. We have a holder - that is not shipped with the device unfortunately. You can grab it in our cubelab or simply following this link.
It’s supposed to look like this and holds the torch:
Automation
For this we have an extra module that was roughly documented here: UC2Serial Android App | openUC2 Documentation. It’s a based around a little PCB: openUC2 Xiao AI Microscope hardware control PCB | openUC2 Documentation that controls illumination and a motor (i.e. perestaltic pump or focus motor) via the UC2-ESP Firmware. Maybe that’s what you’re looking for? It can be controlled using serial (e.g. python, javascript…) blueooth or wifi.
You can always come over of course. It’s fun -they say 
Hi there, I am in a similar position: just got the Seeed Studio AI microscope and I am excited to start making use of it to prototype an application to preservation.
I am currently looking for the Gerber files for the openUC2 Xiao AI Microscope hardware control PCB. I might be missing something but I have not found them in the organisational GitHub or in the docs. Would anyone be able to point me to them?
