7 ms·

Turn your iPhone into a high-power digital microscope for around $10

168 points by shard 13y ago

mathgladiator 13y ago
seriously cool hack; love it. This would be great for my niece.
morpher 13y ago
Very nice. I wonder if a similar lens could be purchased individually so a bunch of laser pointers don't have to be sacrificed.
niels_olson 13y ago
Pathology resident here. I really like this hack, but a fair amount of my work is at higher magnification, and requires much better correction. However, I have been very impressed with the magnifi by arcturus labs. If you already have a scope and just want to take pictures, I highly recommend it. I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras. http://arcturuslabs.com/ http://arcturuslabs.com/ Not a shill, just a very satisfied customer. Also, check out http://reddit.com/r/pathology http://reddit.com/r/pathology for lots of what-is-that? pics!
- untilHellbanned 13y ago
  molecular biologist here, I just bought one from arcturuslabs, thanks for the tip!
- aroch 13y ago
  Huh, pretty cool. Unfortunately, most of my microscopy involves confocal of some sort so this wouldn't do much for me.
- apaprocki 13y ago
  > I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras. Similarly, I have a friend who just bought a high-power field scope (land->land viewing instead of land->sky) and also found an adapter for the iPhone camera. Same thing happened there. The quality of his pictures is great for what it is and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of a SLR attachment or other type of digital camera.
paulrosenzweig 13y ago
I'm guessing this is fake. A laser pointer lens would let your iPhone see cells?
- DanBC 13y ago
  http://hackaday.com/2011/10/19/cellphone-microscope-for-about-20/ http://hackaday.com/2011/10/19/cellphone-microscope-for-abou... http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/diy-cellphone-microscope http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/diy-cellphone-micr... > Using tape, rubber and a tiny glass ball, researchers transformed an iPhone into a cheap, yet powerful microscope able to image tiny blood cells. They’ve also added a clinical-grade cellphone spectroscope that might be able to measure some vital signs. > And with a few dollars and some patience, you can do the same to your own phone. (See instructions below.) > “It still amazes me how you can build near-research-grade instruments with cheap consumer electronics,” said physicist Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu of the University of California at Davis, leader of a study March 2 in PLoS ONE. “And with cellphones, you can record and transmit data anywhere. In rural or remote areas, you could get a diagnosis from a professional pathologist halfway around the world.”
- austinz 13y ago
  I don't know about this particular implementation, but MAKE Magazine recently featured a similar DIY project (although this one doesn't use an iPhone, and instead projects the image onto a wall). http://makezine.com/projects/laser-projection-microscope/ http://makezine.com/projects/laser-projection-microscope/
- hnriot 13y ago
  maybe... they didn't show any photos (with exif info to look at,) just the video.
lhl 13y ago
That's a fantastic hack, definitely want to build one. Here's the actual Instructables link: http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/ http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-mic... There was a recent Kickstarter selling a 15X lens recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-lens-cell-phone-based-microscope http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-le... but this is closer to the work Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has been doing at UCLA. They started 3D printing custom backs for dumbphones years ago. An article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html It looks like they've moved to smartphones now: http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscope-attachment-for-cell-phones/ http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscop... and they can now resolve "a single virus" and nanoparticles down to 90-100nm: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartphone-microscope-248254.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartp...
- niels_olson 13y ago
  As a pathology resident, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should be looking for a new job. But everything radiology does is digital, and they haven't run out of radiology jobs, so maybe the future's not so bad...
  - spartango 13y ago
    Graduation rates for pathologists are stagnant or falling, and case loads are rising as people get old and cancerous. Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.
  - lhl 13y ago
    Wells, it seems like drastically lowering costs for tools would if anything, increase demand for pathology expertise. Also, Ozcan's work has mostly been focused on developing countries - opening up new markets if you want to look at it that way. Medical equipment manufacturers might have more to worry about, but I'd guess the amount of regulation involved will probably buffer them long enough to adapt to any changes. What's most fascinating to me about Ozcan's work is the amount of computational photography involved for getting usable images. A few years back it was mostly MATLAB but I imagine now you could write shaders that run right in the phone GPUs...
malbs 13y ago
This is definitely going to be the next weekend project with my kids. They are so scared of spiders (daddy long legs in particular, our house has thousands of them). Time to show the girls what they look like at 175x magnification!
- Sukotto 13y ago
  Maybe start with something that they want to see close up. For example, have each one pick something rough, something smooth, something that grows, a small toy, etc. If your kids are anything like mine, starting by forcing them to confront a fear will just make them hate the technology and they'll be less willing to participate the next time you want to do a cool project with them.
  - malbs 13y ago
    Good idea, ease into it, show them some leaves, stem cross sections, then "hey I wonder what a sugar ant looks like..." lead into the spider gently
- ars 13y ago
  Spiders at 175x magnification look much worse. Not sure that this is a great idea. Even dust mites look scary at high magnification. Try letting the spider walk all over you instead.
  - malbs 13y ago
    Yeah you're right, it will probably terrify them - I have tried though, play with the spiders, pick them up and put them outside, doesn't seem to help
c23gooey 13y ago
I've done something similar but used the lens out of an old CD drive
- lignuist 13y ago
  That should be a laser lens as well.
guelo 13y ago
While this is a nice hack, for $64 you can get a really nice and functional kid's microscope that goes up to 400x. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOU54O http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOU54O
- vmarsy 13y ago
  The difference here is you get digital images, so you can push the hack further and do any kind of App you'd like (for instance taking multiple picture while moving the object and reconstitute a big picture of the full object, or whatever you can think of) Of course it may be possible to attach a camera to the microscope you show, it just seems more complicated.
- shocks 13y ago
  That's six times more expensive, not digital, and not a fun hack. I fail to understand your point.
  - jlgreco 13y ago
    Perhaps his exception is to the "high-powered" claim.
  - memracom 13y ago
    Do you not understand what "digital" means? The kids microscope is the lens, not the image recorder. If you set up an attachment to hold your smartphone in front of the viewpiece, then anything that your eye can see can be digitized.
raldi 13y ago
If you make one, please post your results to http://extremecloseups.reddit.com http://extremecloseups.reddit.com !
Aardwolf 13y ago
Would this also work for non-Apple phones? The article seems to be very specific about only mentioning iThings. Is there something about them the others don't have that is required for this?
- Link- 13y ago
  I can think of no reason why this shouldn't work for any other device given enough camera megapixels and image quality. I might be wrong though.
- keithpeter 13y ago
  It should work with any phone. The iThing specificness probably comes from the dimensions of the stand you need to make to hold the phone. Just tried holding the 15mm eyepiece off my old school microscope (optical) in front of the lens on my blackberry. The Thinkpad trackpoint fills the circular image field nicely (and it shows all the crud down there, so I'm cleaning it out with a brush now). Very sensitive to having the axes coincident. Anyone any idea about the focal length of the LED pointer lens?
lignuist 13y ago
After reading this, I just glued (removable) a 90 degree led lens to my phone. Nice results so far. Edit: Link to such a lens: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/611389199/Led_Light_Lens_90_Degree_for.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/611389199/Led_Light_Lens_9... I am happy that I turned my phone into a macro camera for a few cents. :) Edit2: sorry, I used a 60 degree lens, not a 90 degree one.
- pbhjpbhj 13y ago
  Alibaba link has a minimum order of 5000 FWIW (but I expect it was post simply to show the type).
  - lignuist 13y ago
    Exactly. I ordered mine in a pack of ten at ebay. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?Led+lens+60+degree&_nkw=Led+lens+60+degree&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?Led+lens+60+degree&_nkw=Led+l...
Link- 13y ago
"CELLSTAGRAM" - Instagram for cellular structures? j/k. This is an amazing hack, I remember when we were in school, we barely had access to a microscope. It was fascinating seeing the world from that perspective and always wished we could experiment with it further. This is a great hack, especially for under-privileged schools and kids in our region of the world (Lebanon, Middle East).
sp332 13y ago
Do you have to worry about the focal length of the lens when doing the build, or will the phone autofocus reasonably well?
- wmeredith 13y ago
  The viewing platform height is adjustable.
rfatnabayeff 13y ago
When they zoom in using the touchscreen - isn't that the digital zoom, not optical? If so, the last x10 seems not legit.
- LionRoar 13y ago
  Indeed! I was going to remark the same. Also a side effect of digital zoom is that it is not perfectly sharp. You see this already in the example pictures. After all, digital zoom is more of an effect then real zooming. For this reason I never use digital zoom on a digital camera. On my PC I have software that does a better job :)
- evacuationdrill 13y ago
  ". . . the iPhone 4S is equipped with a 5x digital zoom, not optical zoom." http://www.imore.com/iphone-4s-8mp-camera-hands http://www.imore.com/iphone-4s-8mp-camera-hands Other sources I looked at said that some phones do have optical, but it's generally tough due to the depth needed.

168 points by shard 13y ago

seriously cool hack; love it. This would be great for my niece.

Very nice. I wonder if a similar lens could be purchased individually so a bunch of laser pointers don't have to be sacrificed.

niels_olson 13y ago

Pathology resident here. I really like this hack, but a fair amount of my work is at higher magnification, and requires much better correction. However, I have been very impressed with the magnifi by arcturus labs. If you already have a scope and just want to take pictures, I highly recommend it. I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras. http://arcturuslabs.com/ http://arcturuslabs.com/ Not a shill, just a very satisfied customer. Also, check out http://reddit.com/r/pathology http://reddit.com/r/pathology for lots of what-is-that? pics!

untilHellbanned 13y ago
molecular biologist here, I just bought one from arcturuslabs, thanks for the tip!
aroch 13y ago
Huh, pretty cool. Unfortunately, most of my microscopy involves confocal of some sort so this wouldn't do much for me.
apaprocki 13y ago
> I can take better pictures with my iphone 5 and my magnifi than some folks seem to be able to take with their far more expensive dedicated cameras. Similarly, I have a friend who just bought a high-power field scope (land->land viewing instead of land->sky) and also found an adapter for the iPhone camera. Same thing happened there. The quality of his pictures is great for what it is and it's a tiny fraction of the cost of a SLR attachment or other type of digital camera.

paulrosenzweig 13y ago

I'm guessing this is fake. A laser pointer lens would let your iPhone see cells?

DanBC 13y ago
http://hackaday.com/2011/10/19/cellphone-microscope-for-about-20/ http://hackaday.com/2011/10/19/cellphone-microscope-for-abou... http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/diy-cellphone-microscope http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2011/03/diy-cellphone-micr... > Using tape, rubber and a tiny glass ball, researchers transformed an iPhone into a cheap, yet powerful microscope able to image tiny blood cells. They’ve also added a clinical-grade cellphone spectroscope that might be able to measure some vital signs. > And with a few dollars and some patience, you can do the same to your own phone. (See instructions below.) > “It still amazes me how you can build near-research-grade instruments with cheap consumer electronics,” said physicist Sebastian Wachsmann-Hogiu of the University of California at Davis, leader of a study March 2 in PLoS ONE. “And with cellphones, you can record and transmit data anywhere. In rural or remote areas, you could get a diagnosis from a professional pathologist halfway around the world.”
austinz 13y ago
I don't know about this particular implementation, but MAKE Magazine recently featured a similar DIY project (although this one doesn't use an iPhone, and instead projects the image onto a wall). http://makezine.com/projects/laser-projection-microscope/ http://makezine.com/projects/laser-projection-microscope/
hnriot 13y ago
maybe... they didn't show any photos (with exif info to look at,) just the video.

lhl 13y ago

That's a fantastic hack, definitely want to build one. Here's the actual Instructables link: http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/ http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-mic... There was a recent Kickstarter selling a 15X lens recently: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-lens-cell-phone-based-microscope http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/968523355/micro-phone-le... but this is closer to the work Dr. Aydogan Ozcan has been doing at UCLA. They started 3D printing custom backs for dumbphones years ago. An article from 2009: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/08/business/08novel.html It looks like they've moved to smartphones now: http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscope-attachment-for-cell-phones/ http://dailybruin.com/2013/09/27/ucla-team-invents-microscop... and they can now resolve "a single virus" and nanoparticles down to 90-100nm: http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartphone-microscope-248254.aspx http://newsroom.ucla.edu/portal/ucla/ucla-researchers-smartp...

niels_olson 13y ago
As a pathology resident, this is the kind of thing that makes me wonder if I should be looking for a new job. But everything radiology does is digital, and they haven't run out of radiology jobs, so maybe the future's not so bad...
- spartango 13y ago
  Graduation rates for pathologists are stagnant or falling, and case loads are rising as people get old and cancerous. Hopefully CAD tools will speed you up, rather than put you of a job. Having worked with pathologists, I think digital has a ways to go before it replaces you entirely.
- lhl 13y ago
  Wells, it seems like drastically lowering costs for tools would if anything, increase demand for pathology expertise. Also, Ozcan's work has mostly been focused on developing countries - opening up new markets if you want to look at it that way. Medical equipment manufacturers might have more to worry about, but I'd guess the amount of regulation involved will probably buffer them long enough to adapt to any changes. What's most fascinating to me about Ozcan's work is the amount of computational photography involved for getting usable images. A few years back it was mostly MATLAB but I imagine now you could write shaders that run right in the phone GPUs...

malbs 13y ago

This is definitely going to be the next weekend project with my kids. They are so scared of spiders (daddy long legs in particular, our house has thousands of them). Time to show the girls what they look like at 175x magnification!

Sukotto 13y ago
Maybe start with something that they want to see close up. For example, have each one pick something rough, something smooth, something that grows, a small toy, etc. If your kids are anything like mine, starting by forcing them to confront a fear will just make them hate the technology and they'll be less willing to participate the next time you want to do a cool project with them.
- malbs 13y ago
  Good idea, ease into it, show them some leaves, stem cross sections, then "hey I wonder what a sugar ant looks like..." lead into the spider gently
ars 13y ago
Spiders at 175x magnification look much worse. Not sure that this is a great idea. Even dust mites look scary at high magnification. Try letting the spider walk all over you instead.
- malbs 13y ago
  Yeah you're right, it will probably terrify them - I have tried though, play with the spiders, pick them up and put them outside, doesn't seem to help

c23gooey 13y ago

I've done something similar but used the lens out of an old CD drive

lignuist 13y ago
That should be a laser lens as well.

guelo 13y ago

While this is a nice hack, for $64 you can get a really nice and functional kid's microscope that goes up to 400x. http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOU54O http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000NOU54O

vmarsy 13y ago
The difference here is you get digital images, so you can push the hack further and do any kind of App you'd like (for instance taking multiple picture while moving the object and reconstitute a big picture of the full object, or whatever you can think of) Of course it may be possible to attach a camera to the microscope you show, it just seems more complicated.
shocks 13y ago
That's six times more expensive, not digital, and not a fun hack. I fail to understand your point.
- jlgreco 13y ago
  Perhaps his exception is to the "high-powered" claim.
- memracom 13y ago
  Do you not understand what "digital" means? The kids microscope is the lens, not the image recorder. If you set up an attachment to hold your smartphone in front of the viewpiece, then anything that your eye can see can be digitized.

raldi 13y ago

If you make one, please post your results to http://extremecloseups.reddit.com http://extremecloseups.reddit.com !

Aardwolf 13y ago

Would this also work for non-Apple phones? The article seems to be very specific about only mentioning iThings. Is there something about them the others don't have that is required for this?

Link- 13y ago
I can think of no reason why this shouldn't work for any other device given enough camera megapixels and image quality. I might be wrong though.
keithpeter 13y ago
It should work with any phone. The iThing specificness probably comes from the dimensions of the stand you need to make to hold the phone. Just tried holding the 15mm eyepiece off my old school microscope (optical) in front of the lens on my blackberry. The Thinkpad trackpoint fills the circular image field nicely (and it shows all the crud down there, so I'm cleaning it out with a brush now). Very sensitive to having the axes coincident. Anyone any idea about the focal length of the LED pointer lens?

lignuist 13y ago

After reading this, I just glued (removable) a 90 degree led lens to my phone. Nice results so far. Edit: Link to such a lens: http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/611389199/Led_Light_Lens_90_Degree_for.html http://www.alibaba.com/product-gs/611389199/Led_Light_Lens_9... I am happy that I turned my phone into a macro camera for a few cents. :) Edit2: sorry, I used a 60 degree lens, not a 90 degree one.

pbhjpbhj 13y ago
Alibaba link has a minimum order of 5000 FWIW (but I expect it was post simply to show the type).
- lignuist 13y ago
  Exactly. I ordered mine in a pack of ten at ebay. http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?Led+lens+60+degree&_nkw=Led+lens+60+degree&_sacat=0&_from=R40 http://www.ebay.com/sch/i.html?Led+lens+60+degree&_nkw=Led+l...

Link- 13y ago

"CELLSTAGRAM" - Instagram for cellular structures? j/k. This is an amazing hack, I remember when we were in school, we barely had access to a microscope. It was fascinating seeing the world from that perspective and always wished we could experiment with it further. This is a great hack, especially for under-privileged schools and kids in our region of the world (Lebanon, Middle East).

sp332 13y ago

Do you have to worry about the focal length of the lens when doing the build, or will the phone autofocus reasonably well?

wmeredith 13y ago
The viewing platform height is adjustable.

rfatnabayeff 13y ago

When they zoom in using the touchscreen - isn't that the digital zoom, not optical? If so, the last x10 seems not legit.

LionRoar 13y ago
Indeed! I was going to remark the same. Also a side effect of digital zoom is that it is not perfectly sharp. You see this already in the example pictures. After all, digital zoom is more of an effect then real zooming. For this reason I never use digital zoom on a digital camera. On my PC I have software that does a better job :)
evacuationdrill 13y ago
". . . the iPhone 4S is equipped with a 5x digital zoom, not optical zoom." http://www.imore.com/iphone-4s-8mp-camera-hands http://www.imore.com/iphone-4s-8mp-camera-hands Other sources I looked at said that some phones do have optical, but it's generally tough due to the depth needed.