Touptek microscope cameras come with a surprisingly decent piece of software called ToupView. For me the best feature is the effortless focus stacking (EDF in the app parlance): all I need to do is to slowly turn the fine focus knob on the microscope, and the app assembles the focus-stacked image in real time from the live video feed. The app also comes with a decent set of measuring tools, but nothing out of the box for measuring spores. However, this can be addressed using a custom measuring tool (which happens to be easy enough, except it is undocumented).

So without further ado:

  1. Start by downloading these three files to use in the steps below: spore-width.lua, spore-height.lua and spore-q.lua files; put them somewhere sensible on your computer (mine are in a Documents\lua\ folder),
  2. Open the Measurements Options dialog (Options / Measurement …)
  3. Select the Sheet category:
    1. Check the statistics checkboxes at the top,
    2. Click the Custom Object button, then Add:
      • Name it ‘Spore’ and use the Add button in the subdialog twice to add two Line objects,
      • Close the Custom Object dialog to get back to the Measurement Options Sheet category.
    3. Click the Custom Column button:
      • Click Add to add a column called ‘Q’,
      • Close the Custom Column dialog,
    4. Click the Custom Calculation dialog,
      • Click Add, then fill in the form using ‘Width’ as the column, ‘Spore’ as the object; then click on the icon right of the Code field and use it to select the spore-width.lua file you downloaded earlier,
      • Repeat the above steps for the ‘Height’ column (using spore-height.lua) and ‘Q’ column (using spore-q.lua),
      • Close the Custom Calculation dialog.
  4. Back in the Options / Measurement dialog select the Object category:
    1. Click on the + sign left of the Spore object (at the very bottom of the list),
    2. Click on the Label Type dropdown, and check all four checkboxes (Name, Width, Height, Q).
    3. Click on the ‘Show labels of subobjects’ dropdown to set it to False if it is not already.
  5. That’s it, close the Options dialog.

To use the custom tool:

  1. Select ‘Spore’ from Measurements / Custom
  2. Click four times at the appropriate points of the spore to define the width and height lines.

To see your measurements click the Measurement Sheet tab at the bottom of the app.

Note: oddly, the only way to delete anything in this app seems to be to select it and then use Edit/Cut, aka Ctrl+X; so if you want to delete a measurement, click the measurement row, then Ctrl+X.