DIY Digital Microscope

Camera Placement

First Adaption

  
 
DIY Digital Microscope

Staying with microscopes, I have to build my own digital one. I want one with viewing from underneath.

Using a Dollar store $3 webcam, a piece of plywood, 3 4 inch bolts, 5 washers, 6 nuts, 4 wingnuts and 2 small pieces of 1/4 inch plastic. The only item I purchased was the webcam. Everything else I had laying around. This was just a quick work around I put together to see if it is worth while making.

I wanted to microscopically look at live samples from underneath. It actually works better than I thought it would. It looks to give about 4x the magnification, you are definitely not going to see bacteria. Though, I might be able to see other micro-organisms, I will further test this. As of yet this is not a final build, I will be making many improvements to this setup, especially with the magnification. I would like to at least get to 100x magnification. I just wanted to see if this would be worth while pursuing. And yes it is. And for a very low cost.

In this setup I have the camera is fixed and the sample is moving up and down.

Inspiration for this build came from here, they use a smartphone and laser pointer optics:
https://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/

Here is another link using cardboard for the build:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cHcX0vx4FZM

There also is the FlyPi that uses the Raspberry Pi system and camera:
https://open-labware.net/projects/flypi/

I will be looking further into the this version and the FlyPi.