30 minute USB microscope

Step 5 Take some pics!

so, now take some pics.. i took a few pics of things you might have arounds so you can get a sense of how much things get magnified..

one really neat thing i had around was a piece of core memory from an old CDC-6600 machine (classic machine nuts can begin going crazy now)

so below you can see a broad picture of the board, and the other picture which is a close up of the torriod and wire mesh that make up the memory cells


since the camera is a 2 megapixel camera its got pretty good resolution, the software logitech makes for it seems like it was made for the job. and the zeis lens has an electromechanical focus that seems to adjust to the bizarre focal length we have here.

Comments

[panic mode]

nice job. where did you get core memory? it's awesome...

[phar]

got it from the secret place where old super computers go to die.. warning: this will make you sad http://www.stonedcoder.org/~phar/cdc6600/

[bartales]

I have a logitech webcam and unfortunately all I can see is a image of a inside lens of the microscope. When I use only the microscope I have a good image and when I also use the webcam I can focus it to get a very good image. But together they don't work. Is it something that I miss? Please, give me an idea since I desperately need to take pictures with an webcam and the radioshack microscope seems to give a good magnification for my project.

[seandogue]

Nice job. this is a great project. I've used an old microscope objective with my quickcam 4K a few times by taping the lens body onto the camera body, but nothing quite as permanent or quite as effective. I like the light...

[joebled]

Interesting project. I was a Customer Engineer and worked on Control Data 6600s in the company data center in Houston in the late 60s and 70s. Replacing these memory stacks was a regular procedure. the machine was 60 bits wide with NO parity check.

[kmpres]

Well done project. Nice way to get the image into a computer for storage or processing. I too, was a service engineer, late 70's to early 00's, and in the early 90s I was servicing two Honeywell H716s at a location in Japan. They were the last two such CPUs with core memories in use in the world and had two 4K cores, 12 bits wide, and a wire-wrapped card-cage with 10 CPU cards. The things were octal coded and required a fat-finger routine to get the paper tape to load...

[a_ride_4_ever]

wow, put the coffee cup down and step away from the table. on a nice note, the scope looks like it would come in handy for those pesky SMD fixes It would be helpful it was smaller. all in all a neat cheap design. I used a pocket loop 10x about $5 from e-bay and a older logitch camera and came up with something smiler but it was a real pain to keep the focus correct.

[jolsavicky]

Impressive quality image from some off the shelf hardware and a good measure of ingenuity. Nice work!