Fluorescence microscopy has become a ubiquitous part of biological research and synthetic biology, but hardware can often be large and prohibitively expensive. This is particularly true for labs with small budgets, including those in the DIY Bio community and developing countries. Queuing systems imposed in labs for use of a few expensive microscopes can make research even more laborious and time-consuming than it needs to be. Furthermore, this makes it almost impossible to perform time-lapse imaging or imaging in environments such as in an incubator or in a fume hood. We aim to provide a well documented, affordable, physically compact, easily modifiable and high quality brightflied/fluorescence microscope to address all of these problems. We are designing it in a modular fashion such that it can be used standalone and also be incorporated into larger frameworks, with various pluggable stages.