The £500 Dirty Photo

 I've been attempting to stitch together sets of photos from die shots for ages. I've managed about three so far, one of which was a big one. The latest attempt has been a failure on every computer I have, and each failure has taken hours in some cases, even overnight. The computers I have are mainly second hand and none of them are very modern or powerful.

Having a definite job to do I decided to buy a more powerful machine to do it on. So I spent £500 or so on a new (ok second hand) machine.
The result is a 386MB TIF file. I can't really post all of it here, so I've got a scaled down version:

This is an 8Mb version of the file. It's about 2000 pixels on a side, which is considerably smaller than the 10000 pixels on a side that the full image uses. The zoom that is possible on the full image is much greater than this scaled down version.
Unfortunately there's some dirt on these photos, which I'm not very worried about as I can retake some or all of the photos and rerun the panorama generation. The dirt is in the middle of the ROM so not the best place it could have ended up.

So there we have it, I spent £500 to get a dirty photograph.

XY Table Update

The XY table project has moved on a bit. I've finally printed a couple of single axis mounts for the DVD drive stepper motors. The motors have ended up as the only part of the DVD mechanism to be used in the table. I'm planning on mounting one of the tables on top of another to give me the XY motion I need for the automating of the die shots.

Prototype X-Y Table

 The new microscope came with a nice XY stage, but the slide holder was missing. I made one from a cheap XY table. The XY stage is manual, which is fine for adhoc looking at dies, but for photographing dies and then stitching photos there's a lot of photos. It's tedious doing it manually. So I prototyped an XY table from DVD drive stepper motor assemblies.

I had an arduino and two stepper drivers, so connected it all up;
The result is here, the two stepper drivers are being driven with the same signals.

And another view.

I'll have to make a stage block with a dovetail to mount this on the microscope. I may also remove material from the top table as it could do with being a bit lighter.