Design and Implementation of an Automated Microscope Stage

Optical microscopes remain keen instruments for scientific research nowadays. Widely used in hospitals and laboratories, such equipment helps people deal with various kinds of tasks, most of which, however, are both onerous and tedious; therefore, operations on these manually executed instruments are lengthily and subject to human errors. To alleviate this problem, we equip an optical microscope with two stepper motors and implement the automatic control of the microscope stage. This paper introduces the control system architecture and discusses in detail the development of the communication subsystem and the stepper motor controllers. Test results with a practical application are also provided to illustrate the performance of this system.