I’m not responsible for any damage you may cause to your equipment, even worse, to yourself using instructions provided bellow. Use these instructions at your own risk. 

You probably know the master/slave sockets, this power saving socket strips? Well, they are consuming energy to. Especially the chip ones. If you want to eliminate the standby power consumption of your monitors, printers, active speakers and other devices connected to PC, here is one simple solution. You will need power cord, outdoor socket, 5V relay and USB cable. I use the USB for notebook connected devices, if you have a pc, you could also connect a 5V or 12V relay directly to PSU.

If you don’t know how to connect relay, you should probably buy a ready to use solution. Otherways connect everything together very carefully and double-check every connection with multimeter (I mean it real, your pc is not happy if you feed the main power in its usb socket). Relay fitted nicely in the outdoor socket housing I used, but you could also use extra housing.

I know, this build is not very safe solution. But I’m lazy and surge-resistent, so what :D

P.S. Always disconnect power before working on circuit, it’s not good for your tools ;)

I used the mic of the Logitech webcam (my usb microscope :) and Audacity (Free, Cross-Platform Sound Editor) for recording and analysis.

The results of different memory cards are not surprising, but i also tried different camera settings and was astonished about the significant burst rate drop on higher ISOs. The following tests are done in manual mode with manual focus and all the same settings with exception of ISO.

As you can see, the burst length is getting shorter with rising ISO. The time camera needs to write the buffer to the card is also significantly grown. The reason is the noise. On higher ISO settings we getting more noise in picture and noisy pictures are not good for compression. The RAW-File size (black picture shouted with closed lens cap) varies from 19MB @ ISO100 to 32MB @ ISO12800.

Also interesting is the comparsion of burst speed shooting in RAW versus JPEG. While the burst length with JPEG files is virtually infinite (with fast sd-card), the burst speed is slightly lower.

RAW vs JPEG

And the finally comparsion between different memory cards in this order: SanDisk Extreme HD Video, Hama 150x, Samsung Essential MicroSDHC, SanDisk ultra II

A bit surprising is the fact, that Hama performs better than Samsung :)

I think it’s the best method to measure the performance of the memory card you buying for your camera.  Unfortunately I don’t have faster cards (like SanDisk Extreme Pro), I’m really curious if the 600D can use this high speed cards with full transfer rate.

It’s a third version of digital microscope I build. The first version used sensor and electronics from old webcam, it was useful for inspecting PCBs but the frame rate (15fps @ vga) was too slow to use it for smd soldering. It was very tricky to aim with the soldering tip, because the tip position on the screen was not the real one due the latency.  The second version used analog monochrome camera module I bought by pollin.de, the response time was acceptable for soldering and  but i figured out that monochrome picture is not very useful for detecting solder bridges and other defects. 

While searching for gifts for christmas I found some good offers for Logitech webcams and decided to buy also one for my microscope. The webcam I used is HD webcam 270 (15EUR in special offers on Logitech germany) and the performance is very good for this price.

What I also used is an old m42 lens, m42 lens cap, bellow  and tripod. The advantage of this setup is the possibility to quick exchange lenses (to achieve different magnification ratios) or to replace the webcam sensor through DSLR. But if you don’t have bellow or different lenses, you could also use two pipes sliding tightly in each other as replacement.

The first step is disassembling the webcam. Pill off the cover, loss some screws, unsolder the grounding cable… nothing special.

The next step is mounting of the camera sensor pcb on the lens cap. I used two long m2 screws (actually too long, but i found nothing suitable in my junk box), spacers and some foam pads for insulation.

And finally assembling everything together:

Time to test the new lab tool :D

The picture quality is good, response time acceptable. One problem is the old lens wich probably has no antireflection coating and the light bounce between lens and sensor, this causes a color cast in the middle of the picture.    But overall performance is very nice.

I can even take a video…

I think, the biggest advantage of this microscope is the big distance between lens and observed object. It allows me to work comfortable underneath it without touching the lens with solder iron. Or to film burning stuff without damaging the microscope ;)

Firstly i removed the top and my car became very stable in turns, so my son asked me to tune his car too.
As i stripped his car i leaved the front light LED connected to the PCB and it looked pretty cool. So we decided to put some extra LEDs on our cars, his got blue and green and my red and yellow.

The problem later was to get my son in his bed, i think he would play all the night if he coud :D







P.S: I shouted this photos with tripod and infrared remote control. So the guy on the left (the big one) is me taking the photos.