Frequently Asked Questions
This should be covered in the instructions and is also discussed a little bit in builds. Short answer: use PLA, without any support material or adhesion layer. Layers of 0.1-0.3mm should be fine, I usually use 0.24.
We're working on building nice pre-packaged zip archives of each version, but this is trickier than you'd think. In the meantime, the builds folder has a readme that describes how to pick the right STL files.
At the moment, the instructions try to cover all the options. Customised instructions are a work in progress and if you can help, please join in on that issue thread. Currently, you can most easily find the current instructions in the online viewer. It's possible to paste in a raw URL and get different versions if you need to.
See Resolution and Field of View.
This is explained in downloading STL files from GitHub.
The microscope should print fine without any support material, and often without a raft or brim. I have tested this on quite a lot of different plastic extrusion printers (RepRap, Ultimaker, MakerBot, Retr3d, and many more) and they all worked fine. Give the test piece a try first if you are unsure, and read the issue if you want more details.
I encourage everyone to raise an issue if you have found something confusing or need more information - it means the answer stays online so others can find it. If there's something that, for whatever reason, isn't appropriate for GitHub, contact Richard Bowman at the University of Bath (no emails here to avoid spam, but I'm quite googlable).
This isn't documented as nicely as it could be (it would be good to add it to the DocuBricks documentation) but Richard has put together some diagrams of the quality checks he does to make sure it's printed OK.
There's now a reference sheet on the names of bits of the microscope. This will probably move in the fullness of time, but hopefully that's helpful for now.