Development of a Joystick Controllable X-Y Translational Stage for an Inverted Microscope

An inverted microscope is designed to have a stage in which the specimens can be placed for microscopy. Most of the biological microscope is built in with static or manual adjustable stage which cannot provide consistent and precise adjustment to move the specimen during microscopy. As an add-on to the microscope stage, the existing motorized 2-axis linear stage in the market is bulky and heavy. Therefore, a lightweight and joystick controllable bipolar stepper motor X-Y translational stage was proposed to solve the problem. In our design, the joystick functions to provide input signals to the Arduino Mega microcontroller in order to control the position of the X-Y translational stage. For the X-Y translational stage, the stepper motors of a pair of the linear slides were driven by a micro stepping motor driver with full scale drive signal to provide controllable stepping movement. It was found that full scale drive signals could support higher resolution of movement at 99 +/- 13 mu m. The overall X-Y translational stage weighted approximately 700 g. As a conclusion, the light weight stepper motor based X-Y translational stage allows the user to move the specimen in a small stepping size during microscopy.