Arduino Proto Shield with stacking headers, many alternatives will work fine.

Arduino Uno board, can be found (often cheaper) in many places.

Green Laser Model from Sparkfun, specced at 5mW, max current of 300mA, 2.5-4.5V input voltage.

So, I spend an afternoon to get a green laser module to be controlled from Micro-Manager. However, green lasers (the ubiquitous 532nm ones) seem more complicated to control. For instance, this laser from Adafruit would be a good choice as it draws no more than 25mA (the Arduino can provide up to a maximum of 500 mA) and can be modulated up to 50kHz through a separate control line. Looking into this for a little bit showed that it is quite easy to control a red laser (~650nm) since they do not draw much power and take the 5V provided by an Arduino. That sparked the idea to also control lasers to do fluorescent microscopy on the optical bench microscope.

This driver takes a TTL in through a BNC connector, so I manufactured a bunch of my “Arduino-Micro-Manager boxes” ( firmware is here, description of the enclosure to be written), that gives Micro-Manager the ability to send a TTL through a BNC connector.

These are equipped with a Thorlabs camera that can be run using Micro-Manager from a course-provided laptop, and a Thorlabs LED driven by a Thorlabs T-Cube LED driver. We do this using the optical bench microscopes the students build earlier in the course. At the AQLM course I have been teaching a section showing how to configure software ( Micro-Manager in this case) to operate a microscope.

Adafruit usb microscope driver