Tag Archives: diy microscope

$10 DIY Microscope That Uses A Smartphone For Magnification

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$10 DIY smartphone_microscope

Whether you’re a biologist or a student who cannot afford a microscope, and yet want to explore the nature around you to its minutest form, then spare a thought for this $10 DIY microscope conjured up by students at Missouri University of Science and Technology. Using trinkets and hardware supplies worth just $10 and a smartphone, students are building the microscope as project for their biology lab.

Using things like nuts, wing nuts, carriage bolts, plywood, washers, LED lights, keychain flashlight for the stand and laser pointer lenses and a smartphone for magnification, this DIY microscope is capable of operating in actual laboratory settings.

The powerful digital microscope, with magnification levels of up to 175 times (with single laser pointer lens) and up to 400 times (by stacking up two lenses), will serve as a how-to manual for other institutes (for developing such a microscope). Students working on the DIY microscope are enrolled in two bio sciences courses with an associate teaching professor, Terry Wilson.

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DIY Miscroscope Costs Less Than $1 USD

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DIY Microscope

Part of being a geek is having an interest in science, but pursuing that interest can get expensive. Luckily, there seems to be a way to get to get the cost down without impacting the quality of research too much.

Meet the Foldscope, a project by Jim Cybulski, James Clements and Manu Prakash aimed to find a way to diagnose and treat diseases in a quicker, more efficient fashion in developing countries, where getting their hands on the proper gear might prove troublesome. Prakash explained In a TED presentation that regular microscopes tend to be bulky and expensive, so they set out to create a cheaper alternative, portable and easy to operate above all in order to be more effective, and the results seem to prove they managed to do exactly that.

The foldscope can manage amplification of up to 2,000X depending on the lens, and can be entirely printed on a card which also doubles as the instruction manual to both build and operate. Foldscope requires electricity only for its LED bulb, which lasts around 50 hours, and creating the whole thing costs only between $0.58 to $0.97.

If you want to become a tester for this futuristic but simple concept, head over to the Foldscope  website and apply to become a beta testers.

Source: Technabob

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