Thread

In an $80 motel room, a discovery to shed light on the origins of life

296 points · 107 comments · danso

grantsucceeded · 1790529474 · focus · HN ↗
this revives my recurring desire to get a good USB microscope. Good, to me, in this context:
a few hundred bucks
able to look at microbes
also able to look at less micro level stuff, like maybe the thing i'm trying to solder or fix
is it wrong to solicit comments/recommendations here?
1. staplung · 1790531211 · focus · HN ↗
  Perhaps better to ask here: <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/" rel="nofollow">https://www.reddit.com/r/microscopy/. They get that question a lot.
2. PhilipRoman · 1790533014 · focus · HN ↗
  I'm in the process of building one myself. Take what I'm saying with a massive grain of salt, but I believe you basically need three things - objective, tube lens and a camera module.
  If I were you, I would probably buy a normal microscope that supports a microscope camera attachment, instead of specifically looking for USB microscope. There is a lot of misleading marketing around USB microscopes, a lot of them are literally just doing digital zooming in (I have a 30€ "1000x" microscope from Amazon which is nice for soldering and such things, but these fake microscopes appear even at higher price ranges). Treat anything >1000x for light-based microscopes as a red flag.
3. pppone · 1790533317 · focus · HN ↗
  Some random ones I've encountered (less for PCB work though):
  - <a href="https://openflexure.org/" rel="nofollow">https://openflexure.org/
  - <a href="https://www.eurekamicroscope.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.eurekamicroscope.com/
4. phyzome · 1790552446 · focus · HN ↗
  My household ended up with a couple of ancient binocular dissecting scopes that a university was throwing out. The magnification isn't amazing, but they're fantastic for just grabbing random shit and looking at it, or yes -- things like soldering.
  Ours aren't properly set up for photography, but I did manage to finagle this great shot of a bug curled up inside a hole in the side of a lentil: <a href="https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/image/18906" rel="nofollow">https://gallery.brainonfire.net/v2/image/18906
  The objective lenses are just 1.7x and 3.4x so you can see some cells but not really any details in them. But free is a really good price for that.

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