stealthcopter.com

I’ve wanted a USB microscope for a long time, and I have finally purchased a DigiMicro 200X Zooming USB Digital Microscope from dealextreme (product link) It only cost $40.23 USD (about £27.34 GBP) which I think is quite reasnoble for the fun and cool photos I’m getting out of it.

DigiMicro 200X Zooming USB Digital Microscope

Quick Review
Advantages

• Very Cheap
• Easy to setup (plug and play)
• Can take some awesome photos, see below
• Three illumination settings (full on, half on, off) on top of software compensation

Disadvantages

• Controls (lights, zoom/focus and snapshot) are located on the body which make using them difficult if you are trying not to move your sample
• The stand is not very stable, tightening it to maximum holds it steady at certain angles for short periods of time
• Takes ~ 2 weeks to arrive from dealextreme as they are based in hong kong

Setup

The beauty of this webcam is that it requires no installation with ubuntu 9.10 you simply need to run the software and the camera works! woo! The output of `lsusb` shows the device as:

Bus 001 Device 006: ID 0c45:62e0 Microdia MSI Starcam Racer

and `dmesg` shows the following:

[22844.064666] uvcvideo: Found UVC 1.00 device USB 2.0 Camera (0c45:62e0)
[22844.080844] input: USB 2.0 Camera as /devices/pci0000:00/0000:00:0b.1/usb1/1-6/1-6:1.0/input/input9

Software
Most video programs will pick up the device, I am opting to use a program called cheese which is awesome not only because of the name but also because of its simplicity.

sudo apt-get install cheese

Screenshot of cheese webcam software in action

Lens Cap
Remember to take the lens cap off otherwise you will end up focusing on the plastic cap as shown below. It is fairly obvious if this is the problem as moving the microscope will only change the light levels not the image.

Photo of the microscope focussed on its lens cap

Pretty images

200x Microscope image of belly button fluff

Full ~200x zoom microscope image of belly button fluff

200x Microscope image of a £2 coin

Full ~200x zoom magnified section of a £2 coin

200x Microscope image of a custard blob

Nonmagnified screenshot of section of screen with the google logo

200x magnified section of screen with the google logo showing the individual pixels

Full ~200x zoom magnified section of screen with the google logo showing the individual pixels

Full ~200x zoom magnified section of my finger

Full ~200x zoom magnified another section of my finger

Full ~200x zoom magnified section of an LED

Full ~200x zoom magnified section of an LDR

Any requests for microscope images (within reason) will be considered