![]() ![]() I put it on the mini tripod I use for Hackaday close-up shots, and pulled out a half-finished kit for a bit of soldering practice. I’m guessing that almost any smartphone made over the last few years could be pressed into service here. No high-end flagship cameras here, but the current generation of decent-ish phone cameras with which they gave similar results. The phones I had to hand were nothing special, the mid-range Huawei and Motorola Android devices that are my constant companions for both business and personal use. Useful For More Than Cat Pictures? We give Our Phone A Try Soldering in close-up, a phone camera view. But how about as a quick in-the-field option to sit alongside what you already have? Time to give it a try, and solder something with it. With all this very usable and capable equipment to hand it’s very clear that a mobile phone would have to be an exceptionally good alternative if it were to supplant them. My colleague Elliot meanwhile uses a very high quality 1970s binocular examination microscope that delivers exceptional quality, an instrument he swears by and which you will sometimes see being used in his work like the recent Raspberry Pi Pico review. I’ve also used various different LCD magnifiers belonging to friends and hackerspaces, but while I an extremely impressed by them I’ve so far been put off by the price for decent ones ( even if I’ve brought you a super-cheap alternative via the unexpected medium of an ear cleaning camera in the past). ![]() These lens-on-an-arm are very common with beauty therapists and the like, utilizing a powerful ring of LED lights and providing ample magnification even for my eyes. At various times I’ve used desktop magnifiers and headband magnifiers, but I’ve settled upon a large lens on an Anglepoise-style arm - you know, the springy lamp kind. Fortunately for me though I have a huge variety of options for soldering magnification. There was a time when I was much younger in which I remember being able to read the text on a SOT-23 transistor, but sadly even now wearing glasses those days are long past. What’s Your Magnifier Of Choice? A pin-sharp image delivered by Elliot’s optical microscope. While I have seen optics turn these cameras into pretty good microscopes, my setup added nothing more than a phone tripod, and will get you by in a pinch. ![]() Have I been carrying a capable magnifier for soldering in my pocket or handbag for years without realising it? I decided to give it a try and it worked okay with a few caveats. I don’t need an archival copy of the image… I just needed a quick magnifying tool. Recently I had some unexpected inspiration when using a smartphone camera as a magnifier to read the writing on a chip. That’s not to say that the zoom can’t be useful. You quickly learn never to zoom on a mobile phone camera because it’s inevitably a digital zoom that simply delivers grainy interpolated pictures. It’s a risky step because phone camera modules and lenses are tiny compared to their higher quality cousins, and sometimes the picture that looks good on the phone screen can look awful in a web browser. I have a semi-decent camera that turns my inept pointing and shooting into passably good images, but sometimes the easiest and quickest way to capture something is to pull out my mobile phone. One aspect of working for Hackaday comes in our regular need to take good quality photographs for publication.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
Details
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |