YANMA Yet another microscope adapter, but at least its not for an iphone

Man, this is a cliche thing to print, but it is really useful.  Thats a picture of it on my Amscope 10-30x scope.  Now that I have the dimensions down, I am going to re-print it with a rest for my phone.  I would provide the model, but it was actually 5% “too small” although it could be that the printer just printed it a little small-I need to check the calibration and see how close it is.

Tore these little curlies off with the flush cutter.

You can see here how I trimmed the length a bit too, since I didn’t know how long it should be.  I just used some flush cutters to start the removal, and then the layers peeled off from the Z axis.  Its kind of an adjustable length print, since the walls are just two layers thick.

Anyway, the results are great!  This was taken at 10x, and you can probably already see why it is easier to solder through a ‘scope than with just your eyes.  And sometimes you need to get tiny, so that is what 30x mode is for.

Here is a shot at 30x.  You can see the grain of the plastic!  It is also fantastic for soldering, and checking for shorts in across SMD components.

The adapter makes it easy to take pictures by making sure the camera sensor is where (or near where) your eye normally is when you look at the scope.  If you have ever had trouble looking into a scope (tiny picture, weird black crecents), it’s probably because you were too close or too far away.  The eyepieces help a lot with this, but they don’t fit my phone, which makes it really hard to photograph stuff- hence the adapter.

Now that I have a scope and an adapter, I definitely want to take some 3d stereo-microscopy pictures, and videos of what soldering looks like at 30X.  I think it would be really neat for teaching people to solder SMD components to be able to show exactly what it looks like when solder wicks onto a pad instead of just talking about it.