Week 4 - Buying equipments and building polarizing microscope

WEEK 4 - BUYING EQUIPMENTS AND BUILDING POLARIZING MICROSCOPE

Hello, everyone!  We are back again for this week! 

Lets check out our updates for week 4 😉

For Week 4, we are planning to do some buying equipments session and building the polarizing microscope base. 

On Tuesday, we went to several places around Petaling Jaya to look for some plywoods, acrylic plastic and some hardware components. Luckily, we passed by a store where they put their unwanted woods and some stuffs in front of it. Therefore, we asked for a permission from the worker of the store to bring some of them to our lab. 

Choosing the suitable plywoods

Looking for some unwanted stuffs; acrylic plastic in the store. Thanks to the workers for letting us take the stuffs that we want! 😏

Finally, we got them secured in our hands! Thanks God, we do not have to spend our money on these equipments hehehe 😛

Next, we went to nearest store to buy other hardware components.

Washers

Compression spring and wingnuts

Toothbrush for cleaning the polarizer film

After buying those components, we went back to our lab and measure the stuffs that we got earlier.

 Seen here is Gerard trying to measure the plywood in the lab.

On Thursday, we split into two groups. Qila and Gerard stay in the lab where Gerard make a further observation by trying out  the lens and polarizer using the onion sample, while Qila searching for an application in the Internet to turn smartphone into webcam.

The images captured by Gerard

Qila is testing the application that she has installed called iVCam. The application can be installed here : http://www.e2esoft.com/ivcam/

The other group which is Zati, Chiam and Syahirah went to Syahirah's house to cut the plywood and the acrylic plastic because the cutting tools are at Syahirah's house. Her father volunteered to help our team to build the microscope base. Here are some shots during the entire process.

Electric circular saw

     

         

       Some videos during the cutting and drilling process

Below are the components needed to build this microscope:

1. Base - Medium Density Fibreboard (MDF)

2. Sample and microscope stage - Acrylic plastic 

3. Roofing bolts and nuts 

4. Convex lens

5. Wingnuts and washers

6. Compression spring

Our team expressing our gratitude to Syahirah's father for his help in this entire process. Thank you Mr Jaffril! 

Yeah finally, we got two sets of microscope base!

Looks user-friendly right? 😆

What have we learned?

1. Patient

       We must always be patient and be positive! In order to make an experiment succeed, we have to set a positive mindset that things will work out soon. Just be patient and try as many as possible because failure is the best teacher in life. In this case, we still dont have a proper and clean polarizer film yet. Therefore, we tried to fix the current polarizer that we have and at the same time, we tried our best to buy it at any stores or by online.

2. Communication

In any grouped project or experiment, communication is the key to success. In our case, we have to split into two groups on Thursday. First group will carry out the process of cutting the plywoods and acrylic plastic while the other group will stay at the lab to do some testing on lens and polarizer as well as to test the application for webcam. During that day, we always keep updating on each other of what we have achieved and accomplished. As a result, we have less problems in terms of teamwork.

Thats all for this week!

Till next time, guys!

See ya!👋

XOXO 💘,

Team Sotong