For optical microscopes, light is everything. If you don’t have a good amount of light passing through or bouncing off your sample, you’ve got nothing for your eyeballs or a camera to pick up. To aid in this regard, [Halogenek] whipped up a nifty microscope lamp with some LEDs.
The build uses a neat arch-shaped PCB with a hole in the middle for the microscope’s optics to pass through. Surrounding this are the LEDs, which provide a circle of light focused on the sample, akin to the ring lights so favored by today’s online influencers. The LEDs are powered via USB C, so the lamp can be run off of any garden-variety phone charger you might have lying around.
[Halogenek] reports that the lamp has proven useful for extreme macro shots of PCBs. It’s an easy build to replicate or redesign your own way if you’re doing similar work.
Microscopes are super useful, and there are all kinds of hacks you can do to make them perform better in your quest for science. Meanwhile, if you’ve been jazzing up your own lab hardware, let us know—we’d love to hear about it!
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