A water drop microscope with a smart phone camera

I took this photo of a HTC Desire AMOLED display a while ago with a USB microscope. It has insufficient resolution to see the individual sub pixels clearly. But by adding a drop of water onto the display glass, the subpixels come into clear view.

Which got me thinking: what if I put a drop of water onto the camera window: would the camera become a microcope?

And indeed it does. The quality isn't great, but you can certainly see things that are not visible with the naked eye.

The trick is to ensure that the drop is small enough so that the entire surface is curved. A large drop will have a mostly flat surface and will not act as a lens. Objects will come into focus at a very short distance from the water drop lens – about 5mm.


Using the front facing camera on some of the newer camera models (eg the Galaxy Nexus) has the benefit that you can easily illuminate the subject while viewing the display. The normal camera can be trickier to get good photos because the camera blocks the light needed for a good exposure. The flash doesn't work very well because the subject is so close to the lens. If the subject matter is semi-transparent (eg a leaf) you can try back lighting it. When finished dry and clean the camera window with a soft cloth.


Here are some photos I took (some with the Galaxy Nexus, some with Galaxy Tab).

A microscopic photo of a HTC Magic LCD display through the water drop.

Holly leaf back lit with a desk lamp.

The pins of a TQFP IC package. The width of the pin is 0.22mm.

A holly leaf back lit by a desk lamp.

Finger tip.

Leaf, back lit by a desk lamp. Cropped and some sharpening applied.

PCB vias.

If you have any suggestions on how to improve the quality of the images or would like to share some of your microscope images, please leave a comment at the end of this post. More photos from this online album.

Updates:

27 Nov 2011: It occurred to me that oil has a higher refractive index than water (1.47 for vegetable oil vs 1.33 for water) which might result in better magnification. I'll try it at some point, but it will certainly be messier to clean up.

Roaming bandwidth in Spain with the Samsung Galaxy Tab

There seems no end in sight to the roaming ripoff in Europe. While the situation is improving slowly it's still ridiculous.

At the moment I'm on holiday in the Canary Islands (part of Spain). Before travelling I checked with my operator (Vodafone IE) re data roaming packages. The best they could do is €12 per day for 50MB after which €1 is charged per additional MB (down from €5/MB a few years ago!). I need about 100MB per day so that's €12 for the first 50MB and €50 for the next 50MB: a total of €62 per day, or €620 for a 10 day trip! Added to this is the complication that between myself and the wife we have 6 WiFi devices (2 x laptops, 2 x smartphones, a Kindle and an Android tablet). Our hotel WiFi is locked to a single device, is expensive, slow (128kbps?!), and is only accessible in certain areas (not our rooms).

I found a nice solution. I purchased a pay-as-you-go SIM from a local Vodafone shop (a €9 once off charge and you'll need photo ID to make that purchase). I then applied a data top-up to that SIM: €15 for 1GB lasting one week or €20 for 1GB lasting up to a month. I inserted the SIM into my Samsung Galaxy Tab 10.1v and started the portable hotspot mode (under Settings -> Wireless & networking -> Tethering and portable hotspot -> Portable WiFi Hotspot). Bingo: a portable WiFi hotspot good for up to 5 devices.

The Galaxy Tab's battery life is sufficient that I can carry the tablet in my day bag and have enough power to keep all our devices continuously connected no matter where we were. The Galaxy Tab has security disabled by default: I'd strongly recommend enabling security to prevent others nearby gaining unauthorized access to precious bandwidth (the mobile network here is good... it won't take long to download a full 1GB).

There are still a few problems (which I'm sure there are good solutions out there): Android 3.0 (Honeycomb) installed on the Galaxy Tab 10.1v (aka GT-P7100) seems to have no ability to report current or historical bandwidth use. I believe this has been addressed in Android 4.0 which I eagerly look forward to. Also I haven't figured out how to get remaining data credit on my SIM. And finally Windows 7: in the first few minutes after connecting it seems to go through megabytes per minute: presumably software updaters phoning home, Facebook, GMail brower windows fetching updates etc. It seems to settle down to a  reasonable rate after a minute when about 5MB is consumed.