Foldscope: The Paper Microscope | Hacker News Reader

Foldscope: The Paper Microscope

foldscope.com

169 pointsmarcodiego37 comments

This looks great for my son who is interested in science but shipping to Western Europe at $45 for a single $10 foldable microscope is a little too steep. Hope they can find a local EU supplier some time in the future.

There are also several DIY 3d printed microscope options in case that's easier/cheaper for you.

What about second hand microscopes off ebay? I know you can even get very fancy ones that would be overkill for a curious kid at home. But I'm sure you can tap into the lower end market where for the same cost as mentioned by grandparent you'll end up with something comparable not made out of cardboard.

there are some resellers

Checks out the Blips Micro lenses for smartphone. Shipping in Europe should be 5-6 euros :)

That looks really neat - thank you.

Thanks for the tip, I've been wanting to do some micrography for a while but hadn't found anything decent-looking. Just impulse-bought the blips lab kit!

They have extremely misleading marketing, noting magnification of 150x for the Ultra lens, but that's "with digital zoom" (doesn't add pixels just scales them up like you'd do in Photoshop); the actual magnification is only 33x, which is trash, wouldn't call that microscopic at all. The paper microscope in the OP is actually 140x, much better. Even my toy microscope I got for birthday decades ago as a kid does 750x.

High magnification is not the best for most interesting experiences. The best is to have low magnification stereo with large Field Of View. A range btw 10x and 20x is great to observe fine biological structures in 3D.

Yes, I agree with this- for the vast majority of people 10X is enough! Being able to easily pan the image over multiple fields is nice, as well.

You mean Depth Of Field, not Field Of View, right?

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Field_of_view

No. You can't really adjust your microscope hardware to get a larger depth of field, but field of view is straightforward. You want FOV because most things you are going to look at are relatively thin planes. If you want more DoF you should do photo stacking. Even for FOV, I do multiple field acquisition and then stitch because even my low-mag microscope only covers a 1mm circle.

Our household recently acquired an optical scope. 10x, 40x, 400x with stock eyepiece. With a cellphone adapter, which is about a 40x for the objective (vs 10x actual eyepiece) we hit about 1600x magnification at our kitchen table.

Absolutely surreal to take a toothpick end of yogurt, put it on a slide and WATCH the bacteria in the yogurt running around.

Or other small beings munching up things as they swim along.

It's been a real eye opener for the 7 and 9 year old and strongly suggest people investigate things like this, it's downright cool.

But yes, the few 'lesser' digital scopes are far better for cool pictures of bugs, bees, ants, flies, etc. Once you get into the optical / need slides route, you really need to be looking for literal microscopic things or the depth of field (and lack of available light) make it quite a letdown.

We can see fruit fly individual blood cells flowing out of a smashed fruit fly into a slide. So. Damn. Neat.

My kids are a bit younger than yours (3 and 5), but I'd love to do this with them at some point. Which scope did you buy? I see plenty of relatively "cheap" (<$100) options on Amazon; any reason to avoid those or would they be sufficient for this purpose?

It's a Walter 40-cxm-100 model from ... 2005 ish maybe? (Point being , it's all metal, and SOLID) - where I imagine a newer model may be not so metal and solid (or maybe it is?)

Regardless, we lucked out and had someone give it to us because they were no longer using it for their original purpose (finding parasites , etc in many large flocks of sheep via fecal samples - get gave it a good wipe down, haha - plus I grew up on a farm and live in Maine, so wasn't much of a concern...) But originally seemed to be a $400 scope. Now a comparable model seems to be closer to $300.

Honestly, I have pretty limited microscope experience, but my experience with anything optical really tends to carry a paying for the glass quality situation, and where things like binoculars, telescope, cameras you get it, anything where the optics ARE the tool, there seems to be a price point somewhere separating "this does not work as intended vs this works as intended and this it is actually useful". I have no idea where this line is for microscopes however. Kids telescopes, junk.

I don't know your kids, but at 3 and 5 we certainly had a cheap digital scope to plug into a phone and explore - I still have ladybug, bees, etc pictures on the wall. If you don't have one of these yet, I'd suggest that route first? I can say that my son (9) finds the bacteria/etc amazing as I do, but my daughter is still more into the digital lower zoom levels. Partially age, partially kid to kid basis.

Been doing all of these type of stuff with them hardcore since 2 and 4. Dry ice experiments, building weird things, even built one of those digital topographical sandboxes you've probably seen in the living room (then went for blocks covered by painter rags, instead of sand in the living room...and I'm a painter, ha)

Point is, it's paid off huge. They are ever curious about the world, and often approach things as how or why does this work?

New toys for us all is a hackRF/portapack and a RTL-SDR, and it warms my heart to see them learning about RF at the same time I do.

Sorry, tangent. I'd try to figure out where that optical price point is. And if looking to cheaply get it on a screen, a cellphone adapter is a pita to hook up (it's on a nexus 6p old phone for our case) , it works pretty well, and the additional camera processing our phones do actually seems to add to the experience vs a stand alone camera unit ($150-$500).

We have moss soaking in water on the counter now. Tomorrow is family day, and we're aiming to get real up close and personal to some water bears!

Oh and I was wrong. Its a 4x, 10x, 40x paired with a 10x objective.

Camera objective unknown but seems to be around a 40x

There is a HUGE jump from the 10 to the 40 when you switch.

Somewhere around 50x is the dividing line between "I want to see normal stuff really up close" (best done with a stereo microscope or camera with macro lens [some "digital microscopes" fall in this realm]) and "I want to see microscopic things that are invisible to the naked eye" (best done with a biological style/compound microscope with stage and slides, etc.). They can both be interesting! The Foldscope is definitely aimed at the latter case.

You can get a cheap wi-fi microscope off Amazon for $20.

I find this lazy, high-cost shipping to the foreign lands beyond the map both irritating and baffling. This folds, it fits in an envelope or through a mail slot. It shouldn't cost more than a tenner to ship it. But because they just got 1(one) quote from UPS for hyper-express service, they're missing out on 400 million potential clients in Europe. It's so, so dumb.

I purchased the "Carson MicroBrite Plus 60x-120x Power LED Lighted Pocket Microscope"[1] for $15 on Amazon.

I love it for its portability and durability-- I can pop it in my pocket or backpack and check out stuff on nature trails.

...Checking out its amazon page I also see this related, more powerful product for $20: "Carson MicroFlip 100x-250x LED and UV Lighted Pocket Microscope with Flip Down Slide Base and Smartphone Digiscoping Clip" [2]

And a search for 1000x microscope yields this $60 one "LCD Digital Microscope,4.3 Inch 1080P 10 Megapixels,1-1000X Magnification Zoom Wireless USB Stereo Microscope Camera,10MP Camera Video Recorder with HD Screen" [3]

[1] https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B00LAX52IQ?psc=1

[2] https://www.amazon.com/dp/B015MS8O48

[3] https://www.amazon.com/PalliPartners-Microscope-Magnificatio...

Regular microscopes are so cheap already.

I paid $80 for my kids and $10 for a cell phone adapter. It easily sees 600x, magnification.

You going to lug that microscope around on a hike with your kids?

No, you collect the samples and bring them home for a far far better quality image, lighting, and stable video recording.

At which point your kids have lost interest in what you were talking about an hour ago.

I have one of these after seeing a lecture about them at my University.

They are incredible little devices, I'm planning a charity to donate these to the elementary schools in my area!

We have a similar albeit plastic microscope for our kids. The issue I have with it on newer iPhone is that the phone keeps wanting to switch lenses. So you clip it on one of the lenses, but iOS will switch between that lens and the others based on zoom, light, focus, etc. You can get shots but it’s somewhat finicky esp for kids. These work better with single lens phones.

I'm sure one of the Pro camera apps will let you specify the lens manually.

I have one. It's nice but the packaging is really bad. Once you unpack, you can't easily pack it back again.

Great to see this project (again) on HN. I backed this project on kickstarter and have a box of them from a few years ago. If you want some and are in the US I’m willing to send two your way.

I still have one unopened that I almost forgot about. I got it from their Kickstarter campaign. I've been waiting for my kids to get old enough to use it. It might be time.

Keep it unopened? Might be a collectable.

This looks really amazing.

If well used could be the final blow to vaccine skepticism. The advent of these cheap tools is a very subtle - barely noticed, if at all - change that, as sometimes happen, can have a big impact on society. More of these, please.

>>If well used could be the final blow to vaccine skepticism.

I mean, it could help in the endeavor, by showing directly that there are very small things, and even smaller things beyond them

(*)nobody told me I'd saying these things in 2022

Very unlikely.

I remember a documentary on Flat earthers trying to prove that Earth is flat of course they detected Earth's curvature but they didn't change their mind..

Vaccine skeptics are the same. And it's far harder to see a vaccine 'in action' than to measure the Earth's curvature.

Indeed. You can't reason someone out of an opinion they didn't reason themselves into, as the saying goes.

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