Welcome to the Internet of Microscopes! Hack, Hack, Hack The other solution is simply to trigger the exposure (and other) buttons without touching the wiggly little beast. The first is to build a better frame, and that’s something I’ll probably end up doing eventually, because the inspection scope is a useful piece of gear. There are two possible fixes for the vibration issue. The culprit is the cheesy frame that ends in a thick silicone suction cup that wiggles around like a bowl of jelly. The video mode has a “motion detection” method - it’s always on because the camera wobbles so much that it always thinks the object has just moved. These are minor quibbles, and for the price I’m totally willing to overlook them.īut the killer, for my purposes, is that the stand is so wobbly that the act of pressing the “OK” button to take a picture blurs whatever image was there. The menu system, to turn on or off the LED ring light for instance, is horrendous. Some of the buttons are hard to reach behind the big focus knob. However, all of the small details that make for a pleasant user experience are botched.įor instance, the clearance on the SD card is so tight that you can’t insert or remove it without something thin to press it in, or having very long fingernails. Looking at bugs and flowers was good for a few hours at least. The image is just fine and most everything works as advertised. Out of the Box Nice image, but don’t touch!

It was a fun hack, so I thought I’d share.

Much better! Now I can make microscope time-lapses, but much more importantly I can take blur-free photos without touching the wiggly rig. So I spent an afternoon, took the microscope apart, and got it under microcontroller control, complete with WiFi and a scripting language. Unfortunately, it’s only halfway useable because of chintzy interface design and a wobbly mount.

So I sent just over $40 off to my close friend Alibaba, and a few weeks later was the proud owner of a halfway usable inspection scope that records stills or video to an SD card. And it never hurts to have an inspection scope on hand for tiny soldering jobs, either, though I prefer a simple jeweler’s loupe in one eye for most tasks. Sometimes I need to be able to take photographs of very small things, and the so-called macro mode on my point-and-shoot camera just won’t cut it.

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