Hack a webcam and a film camera into a USB microscope

Have you ever wanted to inspect or photograph something up close, but could not find amagnifying glass or did not have enough light on your subject? Well read on, because this project will do the job for you at little or no cost called "My Inspector Gadget".

Most of you probably have a webcam sitting around somewhere, and after all the high voltage projects you've done using disposable cameras, we bet you have some camera lenses too. In a contest entry Butch shows how to make your very own computer enabled microscope out of stuff that many of you will have lying around your house. What is basically involved is tearing apart a web cam, adding additional lighting and a lens assembly from an old film camera.

In is project he shows how to harvest the lens from the film camera and mount it, as well as where he added the LED. You can see in the picture above, his results are pretty good.

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