Probably the cheapest way to look at dies

[hardwarecop]

Hello everyone!
This is probably the most economic way I've found to look at dies at home!

It cost me exactly 2.89€ turning my smartphone into a digital microscope with the help of a lens that I took out of a laser pointer. This should work with any smartphone or phone with a small! camera lens that has about the size of a lens of a laser pointer.
You will need 0€ if you already have one at home

I just followed this instruction here: http://www.instructables.com/id/10-Smartphone-to-digital-microscope-conversion/?lang=de

Now some results:

Wafers from the wafer hangover:



Random 8751 or 8741 (I forgot which one exactly):


Pentium P5 SX835:


AMD K5 5k86:



So these look a bit blurred. That because I slightly scratched the lens while removing it from the laser diode. For someone who has no other possibility to look at dies "live" at all, this is a very nice and cheap way to.
Sadly I don't have more because my mobile phone just went out of battery then...

Here are some advantages/disadvantages I found:
+ Cheeky low price
+ Quite high magnification
+ Good sharpness, exact sharpness might heavily depend on the camera quality of the smartphone
+ Take a photo instantly - you see exactly the same thing that the camera sees
- Low radius of sharpness - everything but a small area in the center is somehow blurred
- Fixed magnification: Only a small section of the die can be seen. Might be solved by varying the distanced between object, lens and smartphone camera lens. However I fixed the lens right on the camera, so I don't know how much flexibility it would gain with them all free movable
- Lighting is super challenging: Since the smartphone takes up much space and is not kind of transparent, you always somehow block the light that comes into the die. You might solve this by adding LEDs or small light with high brightness right on the phone


So definitely try that out if you don't have a microscope (like me), like to look at dies (like me) and can't afford a good microscope (like me)
Quite much fun for me to look at dies now

[frag_]

Looks artsy!
Great performance/$ ratio

[Vlasta]

What a cool idea!