Maybe I've missed something. It looks cool - but I'm not sure I understand what the purpose of OpenFlexure is from reading the website, what does it do that an old fashioned optical/mechanical microscope doesn't (or one with a digital eyepiece)? Is this meant to find things automatically?
In a flexture mechanism you apply force to a flexible bar and, because of geometry, that displacement gets translated and reduced into a much smaller displacement somewhere else. It only works with very small displacements (thus fine for microscopy). If you want to position the sample large distances, you just need to move the sample.
It's a neat idea made inexpensive by 3D printing, but the major expense here will be the optics (the objective lens). To get decent pictures of cells, like in a textbook, you're talking about $1K minimum, and it can go much higher, into the 10's, depending on application, performance and other optics (the light source and it's lenses).
Might that enable the use of cheaper lenses?
And if you correct aberrations in software then you can use the cheapest lenses (a single element objective and eyepiece) without having to correct for these aberrations in glass.
You would have to slightly rescale the image for each colour but that is not impossible.
One problem in amateur astronomy is that people love spending money on expensive gear (like hifi audio nuts) and they think software is hard. So they sneer at technically complex solutions even if they end up cheaper in long run.
I assume microscopy has the same problem. Why make it cheap when you charge thousands of dollars for selling a top optical quality microscope?
I could be wrong. Haven’t tried it yet. But I haven’t given up on the idea yet.
It seems a tube lens is used anyway, so the advantages of infinity system objectives are not as obvious. I’d stick to DIN160 or so called Olympus compatible objectives.