Startup: Catalyst Frame Microscope Part 1 - Ideation and Prototyping

An Unexpected Journey

It started as a unique gift! My teacher from my anatomy lab course wrote a letter of recommendation for me, and I wanted to give her something special. She was complaining about how she hated lugging around a microscope while she was out in Africa working on zoology research, and at the same time I was reading about the Foldscope a $1 paper origami microscope. Unfortunately they weren't selling them at the time, but I figured I could 3D print her a custom smartphone mounting solution.

So I read through the research paper and found the ball lenses that I needed. Including some half-ball lenses (essentially half a sphere) that according to this one website could produce distortion free magnification. Then through cardboard, tape, the lens, a flashlight, and octopi-level dexterity, I finally got this image.

It looked pretty ugly, but it was good enough to make me decide to 3D print out a simple press-fit mount for the lens and try again. I also ordered an high brightness LED with the smallest viewing angle I could find to help make sure the light is as collimated as possible. Couple of weeks later and I got this:

Unfortunately I never got the half-ball lenses to work, but when I could clearly see that single red blood cell in the middle and see all the intricate little structures in the tissue slide, my jaw dropped. It was amazing to be able to see something so small using your smartphone and a simple mounted lens. Now I started CADing out a more refined model. Luckily I had already learned how to CAD from an earlier project.

The second one was the next one with a simple sliding stage, it gave me an adjustable stage height so that way it was a lot easier to get the focus right. The third one was printed using an FDM Makerbot 3D printer and I was experimenting with having multiple lens including a a laser focusing lens to provide low-power magnification. Because in real world usage, you need a low-power lens to quickly scan an area until you find something of interest and then zoom-in with the high-power lenses. But it was really bulky and weird looking though, so the fourth final prototype was when I took the elements from the third design and completely reimagined it (as you can tell). And it was actually when I was looking at the CAD model on my computer that I realized.... this looks super cool! I'm good at design! (Or at least that's how I felt) And people might actually buy this! So I went and dropped $250 on a high quality polyjet 3D printed prototype, figured I needed it for the gift anyways if it didn't quite work out. (Re-gifting shame) But what I didn't expect were the images I got out of this final prototype:

My jaw dropped even further. The images were amazingly crisp and clear.

Also at the same time, I've been an avid Kickstarter lurker. I loved checking out all the weird and innovative ideas people were coming up with. And I noticed a pattern, people could not get enough smartphone microscopes. There were multiple projects at have been coming out and they all reached $100k in funding. And what I realized was that my microscope could do things no one else's could, it worked like a regular microscope with multiple levels of magnification, adjustable stage, and you could easily position+re-position the slide you're looking at.

Now what was interesting is that up until that point, this project was actually in competition with another project that I was working on. I had decided against going to medical school even though I had been accepted into a couple, because I felt that I could do more for people as a builder and creator than as a doctor, and I needed to prove to myself that I wasn't wrong. The other project was a machine learning based recommendation system to help pair foster kids with the ideal foster/adoptive parents. I already did the neural network for breast cancer classification and took a fairly comprehensive course in machine learning, so I understood the technical details. And I figured if we had Match.com for love, why don't we try to improve the foster care system. But after spending some time calling multiple foster agencies, I found out that they just didn't collect that data. So with that kind of dead in the water and the crazy result I got with the microscope along with apparent demand, I made the executive decision to move forward to running a Kickstarter to build this for the world.

Next: Catalyst Frame Microscope Part 2: The Business of Running a Business