Reconditioning a 50+ year old microscope - part 1 - Fine Focus recovery

I thought of giving my daughter a toy microscope, to let her know of some of the things that exist but go beyond what the eyes can see. But from searching in toy stores, I could not find any product that seemed to inspire proper optical quality. Some products seemed both expensive and very basic at the same time. Some products averaged 50 Euros retail, VAT included.

So I tried to take a look at what eBay had to offer. I quickly turned my attention to real lab grade microscopes. Some were obviously very expensive, but a very wide range of offer in price/age/condition could be found. After some extensive browsing, I managed to calibrate my price expectations and define a budget. My reasoning was that given I had a initial intention of buying a 50 Euro toy microscope, now that I was looking at real lab grade microscopes, I should at least relax my budget to be double that value. I even considered going beyond that, if I found an item that I could see, decide and obtain locally (decreased risk).

Repurposing an old Android Phone

I had an old Samsung Galaxy Y (GT-S5360) which the previous user didn't particularly enjoy for its performance and replaced with a fancier, newer model. With no obvious use to give to the device, I decided to repurpose it for building some kind of a remote monitoring/observation station, and try to find out how it stands out against the harsh outside environment.

While not attempting to simply put the device outside, directly exposed to the sun, rain and extremes of temperature, I made several customizations to better prepare the smartphone turned into a monitoring station.

The first thing I wanted was to have it entirely self-sustainable. As such I bought a 10 watt photovoltaic panel to harvest the energy required by the device:

Drone Recovery Parachute

Failure is a concern that is always present in the operation of a drone. Given the continued increase in acquisition and use of these devices by the general public, safety is of paramount importance. Even the smaller devices of about 2 kg of total weight, in case of total failure at altitude, will fall like a brick and cause damage to whatever is below.

Most configurations such as quadcopters, don't offer any intrinsic redundancy (in spite of having 4 motors). The failure of a single motor will prevent the quadcopter of maintaining level and yaw-locked flight. Some enhanced control algorithms are being developed to provide level and controlled descent in case of single motor failure. Naturally, yaw control is lost, but the on-board inertial sensors and magnetometer are capable of keeping track of the orientation, therefore knowing how to distribute throttle by the surviving motors.

More UV light photography

It is interesting to discover in everyday objects, the specific fluorescence of each one. The particular wavelength (i.e. color) of visible light which is irradiated depends on the characteristics of the substance illuminated by the ultraviolet light. As such a very interesting combination of colors can occur, depending on the varieties of materials the object has. The following dolls is an example:

UV Photography

Exploring light wavelengths beyond what our eyes can see constitutes an interesting domain, because in a scientific perspective it can reveal characteristics of the imaged objects, that our eyes and/or visible light based cameras cannot see.

For example UV photography can reveal the story of our skin. Solar UV burns leave scars that are practically invisible to the naked eye, but through long wave ultraviolet these are clearly distinguishable from untouched skin (for example see http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/06/22/cara-phillips-ultraviolet-beauties_n_1606131.html)

While not having specialized gear for UV photography I decided to give it a try with a UV power LED that I had laying around:

Custom Camera for Image Stacking

On the expectation of obtaining different and better astronomical images I have taken the oportunity to build custom gear for that purpose. The camera itself is an analog Sony CCD HAD 700 TVL based on the Effio chipset. I had it in my quadcopter, and decided to transplant it to this application. It has excelent low light sensitivity (indeed it outperforms the human eye in that respect!), being an interesting candidate for astrophotography.

My task was to adapt an aluminium enclosure to contain the camera sensor and the control keypad:

Listening to Digital Radio Mondiale

The versatility of the Software Defined Radio doesn't seem to have boundaries. While exploring the HF bands, I tried to decode the occasionally received signal from Vatican Radio (http://en.radiovaticana.va/), which as of this writing was the only station I could identify as sometimes transmitting in DRM.