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Now that Summer is here and my students are out of school on vacation, I wanted to expand the
Pond Dip Science Lab in
Beyond by putting a few of my QX3® Computer
Microscope Workstations online with live pond critters.
While this sounds like it would be simple enough to do, electronics and water don't mix well and the last thing I wanted to do was short out an expensive computer workstation. I needed to find a way to let my QX3® Computer Microscopes peer into jars filled with pond water without any possibility of getting wet. So.... a little brainstorming was in order. My father and I tossed around a lot of ideas about how to accomplish this seemingly impossible task. We considered encasing the QX3's in watertight containers and immersing them into an aquarium. We considered cannibalizing a QX3® to build a watertight microscope from the parts. Somewhere in the midst of all of our brainstorming, fiber optics was mentioned. We started tinkering with a short length of image quality fiber optic cable. We cannibalized a flexible neck clip-on book lamp and used the casing to house the fiber optic cable, the objective lens, and a grain of wheat light bulb and power leads. We were prepared to seal the objective unit with RTV silicon sealant, but the parts fit together snug enough to keep it water tight without the sealant. 
We fitted the other end of the fiber optic cable with a small projection lens and a prism, and mounted the assembly in a small plastic box, along with a power jack for the grain of wheat illumination bulb. The plastic box sits on the microscope stage and the microscope objective focuses on the image produced by the prism. It was a little tricky to get the projection lens focused, but once we got it adjusted properly, it worked like a charm! 
The fiber optic cable, lenses and prism came from a fiber optic experimenter's kit I purchased a couple years ago. It cost about $25 USD. I bought the clip-on book lamp a few months ago at a bookstore for about $10 USD. About the Computer Microscope Workstations... My Microscope Workstation System consists of a custom built Internet server that controls two stepper motor assemblies attached to a QX3® Computer Microscope. When the server is active, a timer fires every 15 seconds and operates the stepper motors. The turret stepper turns the turret to the 10x objective. A second stepper motor turns the focus knob through a 1/2 inch range while 14 images are quickly captured using the QX3's Intel® VFW driver. The captured images are processed and combined into a single image and saved in a ZIP file. The turret stepper motor then turns the objective turret to 60x and the process repeats. And again with the 200x objective. Once images from all 3 objectives have been captured, processed and stored in a ZIP file, the ZIP file is uploaded to the Web server by FTP where it awaits download by the Computer Microscope client Java applet on the Web page being displayed on a visitor's Web browser. The Computer Microscope client Java applet on the Computer Workstation Web page downloads the image ZIP file from the Web server, processes the focus information in the images and displays one of the images on the Computer Microscope client window. A focus slider is provided on the Computer Microscope client so the visitor viewing the image in the client window can adjust the image focus. Any of the three images captured from each objective on the QX3® can be selected for viewing by clicking the appropriate button on the client. Each workstation Web page has a message board so visitors can post comments about their observations of the specimens they view through the online microscopes. If you have questions or comments regarding this article, please feel free to email Marly Cain-Fryman or R. M. Cain.
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Build A Simple Aquarium Objective
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