Electronics > Manufacturing & Assembly

An idea; Home made video microscope for SMT work.

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McPete:
Hi All,

Of late, I've found myself doing more and more work with SMT parts of smaller sizes, and some of the less friendly packages.

I had asked around some of the other electronics workshops on our campus, and two of them use these, while another uses a plain-old binocular microscope.

My trouble is that our department doesn't have the cool, free, $15 grand  or so to buy a Lynx, nor can I use a stereo microscope without going cross-eyed.

During my last, particularly arduous project, I kludged together a system using a small camera of a  name that has escaped me, and a tiny screen I salvaged from an autoclave that was being decommissioned. It was poor quality video, onto a small screen, but it got me there.

While my system worked, I can't help but wonder if some of you have a better solution? I'm presently toying with the idea of using a HD CCTV camera and a near-focus zoom lense, but I'm not as yet sure if that's possible.

When  I get back to the office, I'll throw up some pictures of my current arrangement.
Cheers,
P.

IanB:
Surely such things are possible, but the two problems to overcome are depth of field (focus) and binocular vision. With a small enough camera (like the ones smartphones use) the depth of focus problem is perhaps solvable, but how easy is it to move and manipulate 3D objects with a 2D view? I've always found that peering through a magnifier with a single eye giving a flat field of view is OK for inspection, but it is not easy to work that way.

TerminalJack505:
You can probably get a camera that will work with your existing microscopes.  Some scopes have a trinocular port which is specifically made for mounting a camera.  If your scopes don't have this then you may be able to connect a camera to one of the eyepieces.  You can then use a PC monitor or TV instead of using the eyepieces.

There are USB cameras that connect to a PC via USB and cameras that output the picture directly to a TV.

Here are some links to an Ebay seller...

USB PC cameras
Cameras with TV output

free_electron:
usb camera's don't work well. there is too much time lag between what happens and screen refresh. it throws you off...

video will work.
Get a used Mantis on fleabay. i got mine for 150$ .. no need to spend 15K on  a lynx

wkb:
Like this one:  https://www.eevblog.com/forum/projects-designs-and-technical-stuff/smd-assy-station/msg79393/#msg79393 ?

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