Yes, I took an existing vision model that could run at realtime on my laptop, and fine-tuned it with a few hundred manually labelled images of tardigrades.

I don't like the openflexure design at all. I mean... obviously it works for a lot of people, but I just don't want a flexure based stage. I like real 2-axis stages based on rolling bearings, basically cloning the X and Y parts of this: https://www.asiimaging.com/products/stages/xy-inverted-stage...

UC2 is another cool project: https://openuc2.com/ but I found their approach constraining.

Frankly I think you could just buy an inexpensive 3D printer that had an open firmware, and replace the extruder with an objective, a tube, and a camera, and you'd have something up and running cheaper for less time.