Foldscope - The Origami-inspired Paper Microscope

A container full of Foldscopes is crossing the ocean!
over 8 years ago – Thu, Sep 21, 2017 at 01:19:53 AM

Dear Foldscope backers,

Thank you all for your patience in this process. Here is the latest news on our assembly and shipping.

We are excited to tell you that we completed assembly of over 5,000 kits (20,000+ Foldscopes), enough to fill a 20-foot shipping container! These kits have shipped and are currently en route via ocean shipping. This 20-foot container is our first bulk shipment as a company, so it is a tremendous moment for us. In many ways, it is the fulfillment of a dream that started almost 6 years ago.We just want to thank you one more time for helping to make our dream come true!

Let us give you more details on the timeline. Unfortunately, we had to discontinue working with one of our vendors due to issues with inconsistent quality. This was very surprising and disappointing since he was a trusted vendor who previously made thousands of our beta units with no issues. Our new vendor has completed tooling and we have carefully verified the quality of his samples. He is in full production now, and this is the last part we needed; all other parts have already been sourced and have passed our quality control testing.

We are now working multiple shifts to complete the assembly of all kits as quickly as possible so that the remaining shipping containers can go out next week. This means you should receive your kits in October, starting the second week of the month. Some kits will arrive earlier than others, since one of the shipping containers already went out this week.

When the kits ship from our fulfillment vendor, the vendor will generate tracking numbers and send to you via email. The emails will come from [email protected], so please make sure this is a trusted email on your spam filter.

We are doing our best to make sure the kits are everything you have been waiting for. And we're so excited to share these with you all! We will send another update once all the units have shipped.

Our best,

The Foldscope Team

Foldscope delivery timeline
over 8 years ago – Sun, Aug 13, 2017 at 12:06:47 AM

Dear backers,

We hope you are excited to receive your Foldscope kits soon! Rest assured that we have been working around the clock to get everything to you as quickly as possible.

Now that we are nearing our ship date, we would like to give you an update as to precisely where we are.

After procuring parts and raw materials from over 20 different vendors, we completed component-level assembly in our factory and have been assembling those parts into kits to get them ready for shipping. During this process, we have been carefully carrying out quality control to make sure all parts are in perfect condition and nothing is missing.

During our quality control work, we found a few components that required replacement, so this has caused us some delay. The replacement parts should arrive to our factory this coming week, and the rest of the assembly will proceed quickly after that.

This means that we will be about a month late in our shipment, so you should receive the parts in late September.

We sincerely apologize for this inconvenience and, as always, we thank you for your tremendous support! Please stay tuned and we will give you the latest as things come together in these final weeks…

Our best,

The Foldscope Team

New Foldsope Design BONUS EDITION: Direct Mounting Method!
over 8 years ago – Sun, Aug 06, 2017 at 09:20:57 PM

While the last update was all about the new Foldscope design, we actually left something important out, because it deserves some special attention of its own. We are talking about the direct mounting capability of the new Foldscope.

Now, the pilot edition Foldscope was designed to be compatible with 25 x 75 x 1mm glass slides, the gold standard in microscopy for research labs and school classrooms alike. However, recognizing that glass slides are not always available and are prone to breaking, we also designed re-usable paper and tape slides as a more portable, affordable option for preparing samples.

 However, both the glass slides and the paper/tape slides fit into the old Foldscope through the same mounting slots. This meant that it could be difficult to image things that could not easily be mounted onto a standard-sized microscope slide. For instance, to image a leaf, you had to first remove the leaf from a plant (thereby changing its physiology) before imaging it under the microscope.

All of this has changed with our new edition of Foldscope! In our new Foldscope, the lens piece is separated from the light aperture by a hinged flap. This means that you can open up the flap, and insert a variety of differently-sized samples into your Foldscope, before closing the flap and using the microscope as you normally would. This means fewer limitations on what you can mount in your microscope. 

It also means that you can now easily use microscopes in ways that are totally impossible with research microscopes that require a power source and a flat surface. You can literally snap your Foldscope onto anything you come across while having a hike and quickly see the inner microscopic workings of your specimen.

For instance, you can now see the above-mentioned leaf in its living state, without having to prepare a slide at all. See the below videos for examples:

 We're quite excited to see what kinds of wonderful things our community discovers with the direct-mounting capability of the new Foldscope :)

-The Foldscope Team (Manu, Jim, Rebecca, Christine, Alice, Max, and Honomi)

The New Foldscope Design!
over 8 years ago – Wed, Aug 02, 2017 at 10:07:35 PM

At Foldscope Instruments, we are working towards a world where access to scientific tools is not hindered by how much money you have or where in the world you live. We have already distributed over 50,000 pilot units to over 130 countries, and we are very close to releasing the next ~300,000 units, with our production capacity now scaled up to handle an additional ~130,000 units per month from here on out. We are nearing the end of our Kickstarter campaign, but our mission and impact is really just beginning

Beyond providing microscopy to thousands of people, something else quite amazing happened when we distributed 50,000+ Foldscopes free of charge: we generated ~50,000 opinions of our pilot design. We didn’t ask for money for the Foldscopes or the shipping charge, but we did ask for some kind of feedback from our users and set up microcosmos.foldscope.com to encourage them to communicate with one another and with the Foldscope team. Since this project began, Foldscope has been an ever-evolving design (it in fact started as a microscope built inside of a matchbox), and we were happy to bring so many more wonderful perspectives into this evolution.

 Today’s post is about the new Foldscope design, but before we move ahead, we absolutely have to stop and give thanks to all of our wonderful testers who took the time to engage with Foldscope, spreading science in their communities and giving invaluable feedback to our team.

Perhaps the two most common points of constructive criticism were…

1) The pilot Foldscope was a bit hard to assemble

2) The focusing mechanism on the pilot Foldscope was a bit hard to control

When we launched our Kickstarter campaign, we knew we would re-design the Foldscope to give you the best possible affordable microscope we could think up. Those two points of feedback were central in our efforts.

And here it is in all its glory!

 And here it is next to its older sibling:

 The focusing mechanism for the new design was inspired by a Foldscope hack that had been adopted by many super-users in the Microcosmos community. This hack involves assembling magnets on the front and back of the Foldscope to hold the unit together, and then to add space between the lens and sample with a paper wedge. See the original post here and check out the video below for a demonstration!

 As for assembly, we did a couple things to improve this aspect. First, we made the process fewer steps overall. Second, we tried to make these steps as easy as possible by color-coding our new design: yellow shaded surfaces are on the back of the Foldscope, blue shaded surfaces are on the front, and any red-shaded surfaces ought to be covered when the Foldscope is assembled correctly (this provides a quick diagnostic for correct assembly: if you see red, something is incorrect!).

Among other things we are proud of in the new design, here are a few more:

• the artwork! it's been so amazing to bring on board talented scientific artist and illustrator Rebecca Konte (http://www.rebeccakonte.com) to do the artwork for the new Foldscope (as well as for the deluxe individual kit box and the instruction sheet, which we will share shortly).
• de-coupled XY panning - to move more precisely around a sample, we separated the X and Y movements of the Foldscope in this new version (i.e. there is no "twist" in the lens stage as you move it around the sample)
• easier slide insertion - you can now add a slide more easily and without risk of knocking off a coverslip during the insertion process

To take you behind the scenes a bit on production, here is a video of a printing machine working on the new Foldscope design. Takes 10 hours to print 230,000 units...3 days to dry...then repeat to print the other side.

Finally, we wanted to share some awesome footage we have captured with the new Foldscope design at our fingertips.

Here is a larva (mosquito?) that Max found in Berkeley:

And an egg being devoured by ciliates that Manu discovered with his 6 year-old nephew at Woods Hole:

 We will be sharing even more features about our new design later this week :)

Cheers!

The Foldscope Team (Manu, Jim, Honomi, Max, Alice, Rebecca, and Christine)

Tray Cool!
over 8 years ago – Sat, Jul 29, 2017 at 12:48:52 AM

Today we would like to draw attention to a seemingly simple item so that it is not overshadowed by its flashier companions. We are, of course, talking about the inset tray for the deluxe individual kit box.

When designing the box, we had a few different criteria in mind. We wanted it be durable, good-looking, and portable enough to fit easily in a backpack, purse, or tote bag. We wanted it to hold a variety of different tools for aiding Foldscope experiments, both common use items and specialized equipment for performing particular, but enlightening, experiments.

Most of all, we wanted the box to help organize all of the components of our individual kit and to provide easy access to each component when the box is opened. So if you’re out on a hike, or chilling at the beach, and you want to do a Foldscope experiment…? Not a problem, you daring devil!

The key to using our space efficiently inside of a small box, while maintaining robust organization, was a plastic tray molded to accommodate each component. Here is what our final product looks like:

Here is the tray in action being unloaded and re-loaded easily…

While still holding its contents almost absurdly well…

As Foldscope team member Jim can attest to, finding the right format was no easy task. Jim went through thousands of modifications on 3D-modeling software and examining the result at various points by 3D-printing a physical prototype. As we learned along the way, moving surfaces by a matter of microns could make all the difference. Too loose, and parts fall out easily. Too tight, and parts are a pain to get in and out.

While we have always been keen on exploring the microscopic world with Foldscope, we learned a new dimension of its power through the exercise of designing this tray. It was at times, to be quite honest, a frustrating experience, but we are quite proud of the final tray, a testament to diligence and perseverance, and to how the simplest things often require painstaking work to get just right.

-The Foldscope Team (Jim, Manu, Christine, Alice, Honomi, Rebecca, and Max)