Italians rattle little tin for smartmobe mini lenses An Italian "microscopy, consumer electronics and micro-optics" outfit is offering smartphone and tablet owners the chance to get up-close and personal with the world via "an ultra portable and very affordable set of 2 mini lenses which turns your smartphone or tablet into a digital microscope". Working with the Istituto …
Medical bods have been interested in a non-adhesive but very grippy surface for a while - potential applications include holding back skin during surgery.
Geckos achieve this by having an extremely high surface area of their pads - a surface which sub-divides many times.
https://robotics.eecs.berkeley.edu/~ronf/Gecko/
Gecko feet exploit the van der Waals force. As far as I can tell this is different from an electrostatic force as mentioned in the article. This looks to be more like how vinyl "L" plates for sticking inside car windows can stick to the glass without adhesive. I *think* that's an example of electrostatic attraction, at any rate.
It's almost comical how industriously they avoid showing the _front_ of phones with the lens installed - unsurprisingly so since on my phone for instance the strip would fold exactly over the speaker grille. Not to mention that they only show aluminium unibody phones - I'm not so sure the slightly textured back of my Samsung Galaxy would make for a great adherence around the camera.
At any rate, this will likely get used maybe ten times then forgotten at the bottom of a drawer by most people - if you genuinely have a regularly recurring use case, you're much better off with one of those ubiquitous dirt-cheap USB microscopes, even if it isn't particularly high grade: at least those have lenses matched (and fixed) to their cameras, for better or worse. You can even connect one to your smartphone to watch comfortably while you poke around somewhere with the pen cam at the other end of the cable...
I would have thought the re-usable bit means you can remove it rather than leaving it permanently installed so would not worry about the speaker grill. The rest of your assesment about usefulness is about right though.
Although then again at 20 euro it's the sort of thing I might shove in something like a earphones case and carry about when travelling just for novelty.
It’s almost impossible to show how BLIPS performs on all smartphone models, but we certainly don’t try to avoid showing anything. For example, in the video, around sec 20, you can see how the front side of an iPhone with the camera near the corner looks like with BLIPS already in place, and after about 1’35” you see how the front side appears on a Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo. Moreover, as explained in the video after 1’24”, the film can be cut away in order to adjust it for fitting any shape. The claim that we only show aluminum phones is incorrect, as in the movie and in the campaign description you can see different models (Samsung Galaxy S3 Neo and Galaxy J5) of smartphone with plastic bodies; on phones with glass bodies BLIPS have an even improved adhesion.
BLIPS can stay inside your wallet or even on your phone. If you prefer bulky, and more expensive, objects in order to avoid losing them, you need products with different characteristics, but trust me, we really did our homework on this one and working with IIT means working with top notch scientists that approach problems from more angles that I could have anticipated by myself. I trust that BLIPS is a really neat product and the whole team has put serious passion, love and time into it.
BTW, anyone that cares about privacy, can attach BLIPS to the PC / Mac Camera when not in use, or even the dreaded TVs with cameras that are so often hacked and produce different versions of blurred images in order to protect privacy. After all BLIPS does not leave residues on devices and can be used again and again.
I use a USB miscroscope plugged into my phone via an OTG adapter, which is nice because where you want to put the microscope and where it's convenient to hold the screen are often not coincident, but of course that means lugging around an extra piece of kit if I'm not at my desk. I might be willing to give these things a try, although I'm kind of sceptical that they will be good enough for my purposes, but as a casual thing to carry at all times, pretty cool.
I second the other posters who suggest that if you just want to get a close up view of your world a USB microscope is the way to go. Even better get a USB otoscope/endoscope. You can put those in places a smartphone just wouldn't go.
(Your ears of course - that's why they're called otoscopes.)
Portability and affordability are two key features of BLIPS. You can keep BLIPS with you wherever you go, in your wallet, pocket or directly stuck on your smartphone. USB microscopes are bulky accessories, as you mentioned, but can allow you to split the screen from the observed subject. These are different options for different necessities.
Every single image in the campaign is shot with BLIPS without trying to make them absolutely perfect, as we're still developing the app that allows to freeze the focus and turn on the light. Once that is finished, everything will look pretty good as well. We also worked on a stand and ways to support taking photos with the micro, but unfortunately while preparing the campaign most photos were shot without these useful tools. Remember this is a Kickstarter project, therefore a work in progress and it involves testing and bettering all the tools needed.
I ran across several DIY microscope builds for smart phones; I like this one best. I forwarded them on to a number of teacher friends and got nothing but happy feedback. Having their kids help with putting the parts together and then being able to take pictures home with them really engaged them in ways that simply looking through an eyepiece did not.
Take a jewellers loupe, a 10x is a good place to start. Unscrew the lens out of it and blu-tac it onto the lens of your phone. Did this with my S5 and was able to take reasonable macro pictures of flowers and other items. Results are okayish, a little blurry at the edges but does the job.
It's cool but ultimately not that useful. 1200x is necessary to see if a sample is contaminated with bacteria, anything less is a toy. I wonder though what's the lag from source to screen for realtime applications, such as soldering a circuit board perhaps? I know the answer would be very device dependent.
We can open bottles in many ways, but we still purchase bottle openers because they're practical and the same can be said for 1000s of objects...BLIPS is a tool that can be replicated in a number of ways, but I worked and studied to create something affordable, useful and practical, there's a lot of work and sweat behind it, even just setting up a campaign, or production...Creating BLIPS requires a vast set of skills in a number of fields, but we love challenges and also feedback...Now back to work
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