Turn your iPhone into a high-power digital microscope for around $10
tuaw.com
tuaw.com
There was a recent Kickstarter selling a 15X lens recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-le... but this is closer to the work Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has been doing at UCLA. They started 3D printing custom backs for dumbphones years ago. An article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html
It looks like they've moved to smartphones now: http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscop... and they can now resolve "a single virus" and nanoparticles down to 90-100nm: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartp...
Medical equipment manufacturers might have more to worry about, but I'd guess the amount of regulation involved will probably buffer them long enough to adapt to any changes.
What's most fascinating to me about Ozcan's work is the amount of computational photography involved for getting usable images. A few years back it was mostly MATLAB but I imagine now you could write shaders that run right in the phone GPUs...
Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.
Not a shill, just a very satisfied customer.
Also, check out http://reddit.com/r/pathology for lots of what-is-that? pics!
Similarly, I have a friend who just bought a high-power field scope (land->land viewing instead of land->sky) and also found an adapter for the iPhone camera. Same thing happened there. The quality of his pictures is great for what it is and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of a SLR attachment or other type of digital camera.
Of course it may be possible to attach a camera to the microscope you show, it just seems more complicated.
I fail to understand your point.
Edit: Link to such a lens: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/611389199/Led_Light_Lens_9...
I am happy that I turned my phone into a macro camera for a few cents. :)
Edit2: sorry, I used a 60 degree lens, not a 90 degree one.
http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?Led+lens+60+degree&_nkw=Led+l...
Time to show the girls what they look like at 175x magnification!
If your kids are anything like mine, starting by forcing them to confront a fear will just make them hate the technology and they'll be less willing to participate the next time you want to do a cool project with them.
Try letting the spider walk all over you instead.
The iThing specificness probably comes from the dimensions of the stand you need to make to hold the phone.
Just tried holding the 15mm eyepiece off my old school microscope (optical) in front of the lens on my blackberry. The Thinkpad trackpoint fills the circular image field nicely (and it shows all the crud down there, so I'm cleaning it out with a brush now). Very sensitive to having the axes coincident.
Anyone any idea about the focal length of the LED pointer lens?
Other sources I looked at said that some phones do have optical, but it's generally tough due to the depth needed.
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/diy-cellphone-micr...
> Using tape, rubber and a tiny glass ball, researchers transformed an iPhone into a cheap, yet powerful microscope able to image tiny blood cells. They’ve also added a clinical-grade cellphone spectroscope that might be able to measure some vital signs.
> And with a few dollars and some patience, you can do the same to your own phone. (See instructions below.)
> “It still amazes me how you can build near-research-grade instruments with cheap consumer electronics,” said physicist Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu of the University of California at Davis, leader of a study March 2 in PLoS ONE. “And with cellphones, you can record and transmit data anywhere. In rural or remote areas, you could get a diagnosis from a professional pathologist halfway around the world.”