Day 59, An aging USB microscope
I've been slow on getting back to working on my CNC router project after returning from my anniversary vacation, so I thought I would get back into it by crimping some longer wires onto Dupont connectors for the limit switches. I hate crimping connectors. I do it just barely often enough to achieve a 50% or so success rate, and I'm seldom completely happy with the process. Part of it is that as my eyes have aged, it's hard to see them very well. This caused me to dust off my USB microscope, and inspired today's garage gem.
It's a simple USB microscope that I bought back in 2017 for $30. It appears that you can still buy the same microscope from Amazon (somewhat inexplicably) but for some reason it costs almost $60 now. Don't buy it. You can do better now. Definitely. But it has been useful to me over the last seven years to occasionally snap pictures of things that are small. It claims to be a 2MP camera, but when hooked up to my Linux laptop that I keep in the shop, it only reports a maximum resolution of 1280x720, and for some reason today when using cheese (the GNOME webcam application) it seemed to stall out on resolutions greater than 640x480. (This seems odd to me, I thought it did better previously). But in any case, it has a small suction cup and an adjustable arm to hold it in place. I attached it to an old plate from my 3D printer, and used a little cutting mat (you can get from dollar tree, very useful to have a few on the workbench) to keep electronics from shorting out. The microscope also has a little ring light built in that you can adjust.
Here's it on my (messy, sorry) workbench.
The images aren't amazing, but they do work!
I think it is probably about time for me to find something a bit better, perhaps with a built in screen and a better adjustment, but honestly, given the relative infrequency that I use it, this is probably still good. If I get into doing more surface mount soldering, I'll probably get something better.
Happy Saturday all.