Infra-red Microscopy

I have been playing with my microscope. It is a stereo scope so I decided to see if I could hook up a webcam to it. I know you can buy webcam microscopes but I didnt want to spend any money if I could help it.

I had a web cam with no optics and the infra-red filter ripped out that I had hooked up to a zoom lens, I decided that as I could already see in the visible spectrum I wouldn't put the IR filter back in making it more sensitive to the IR from the incandescent lights in the microscope.

With a bit of mucking around I got the focal lengths for both the visible light side and the IR side set the same, this allows me to use one side of the scope as a wide view area (9.5mm) to centre the location to view in the IR field of view on the other eyepiece. The field of view for the IR is 1mm at 640*480 pixels

Here is the scope.

Field of view on IR. Black lines are mm scale on a micrometer.

Surface Mount LED showing junction.

Crystal on haceduino code AG.

I call this one the gold bar.

Mesh grid in a vacuum tube.

PCB trace lit from top.

PCB trace lit from below, good for finding cracks.