Car DVR replacement and related shenanigans

Introduction

With the vulgarisation of miniature cameras and computing devices of all sorts, technologies that fundamentally serve the mobile industry become cheap enough and available to the point of being useful for other purposes. That is the case of DVR devices for automotive use.

Adding metalurgical capability to a biological microscope - part 2

Like I had previously explained, I was able to obtain from eBay (for a minimally decent cost), just the bare vertical illuminator, which didn't include any accessories. The light house was not an exception. The vertical illuminator consists the main body:

and the light house, which in the original device would be based on a halogen bulb of at least 15-20 Watts:

Adding metalurgical capability to a biological microscope - part 1

Biological microscopes among a few other things, are characterized by the fact that rely on transmitted light rather than reflected light, to produce an image of the specimen.This is adequate for most biological needs because the specimen can either be made thin enough for light to go through, or the medium and/or the specimen itself is relatively transparent to light.

However there are other applications in microscopy where it cannot be assumed that the specimen is transparent or able to be ground to a thickness small enough for light to traverse it. Some materials are opaque even at thicknesses of few microns.

The only solution in these cases is to rely on reflected light. For this to be possible, a different illumination system is required on a microscope. This type of illumination is commonly designated of epi-illumination (as opposed to trans-illumination used for biological observations). This is where a device known as vertical illuminator comes into play (picture obtained from a Olympus BHM manual):