The senior design team set out to design and build a manual filter wheel with c-mount attachments. As an important component of a high precision confocal microscope in our lab which investigates the role of mechanical forces in eliciting changes in the biology of vascular endothelial cells, this project is directly relevant to bioengineering. Currently there are available, motorized c-mount filter wheels (e.g. Sutter instruments) and free space filter wheels (e.g. Thor labs) which could have potentially been used, but the motorized wheels are very expensive (~$8,000) and the free space wheels permit too much ambient light to enter our highly sensitive single photon counting detectors. For these reasons, the design and construction of a manual c-mount filter wheel is new and useful.
This project was originally proposed to consist of (i) the design of the filter wheel in Solidworks 3-D solid modeling software, and (ii) the machining of the filter wheel from aluminum using computer assisted machining (CNC) available in the learning factory on campus. The students needed to first, create a conceptual design of the wheel, design it in Solidworks and learn how to run the CNC machines.
From Sponsor's Evaluation of Project 05'
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