Upcycling a laser pointer into a digital microscope

I recently found on Instructables.com, a way of making a microscope using a cell phone or an Ipod touch. I wanted to give a try myself, but wanted to make it "more portable" but maybe not so fancy.

The only thing you really need is a lens from a laser pointer, and magically, I had an old broken one that I kept for no reason..... until today.

I unscrew the tip of the laser pointer and here it is:

 At this stage, the only thing you need to do is to make a hole in a piece of plastic to hold this tiny lens:

You just have to put your cell phone on the top of it:

To focus properly, you can put the object on the tip of a bottle, like this and hold the box up and down to get the best picture:

And this is the results:

Wthout the lens:

With the lens, you get roughly 10X magnification if you campare the 2 pictures.

Hours of fun with my kids from now! Send me pictures if you have some.

Iphone/Ipod stand

After I made an Ipad holder with chopsticks or with a coffee cup sleeve , this is probably the easiest way to upcycle something into a stand: using your old tape cases. The most difficult maybe, is to find one...

For your ipad, you can also use a business card holder as shown below, cheap and efficient!

As a reminder of my old projects :

For as tutorial you can click here

For a tutorial click here

Iphone/Ipod charging dock

No new project to post yet, but I found this cool, elegant and decorative docking station that could be a future project. Old good-looking books are easy to find and it's an inexpensive project. If you are lazy or don't have enough time, you can find some on etsy for around $60.