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DIY Computer Video Microscopy For Under $50
cybrpnk writes: "The QX3 Video Microscope may have been an obscure commercial failure as an educational toy, but it is widely available (for now, at least) as a fantastic tool/toy for any geek. The QX3 hooks up to a USB port and delivers live color 10X, 60X or 200X microphotos at 512x384 pixel resolution. Its kid-friendly software even makes time lapse videos a snap, like this one of TNT synthesis - a whole new way to blow up the lab, do not try this at home! Educators are doing amazing things with the QX3 in their classrooms.
Sourceforge even has documentation on the software command structure used by the QX3, so it may be considered an open source microscope. Get yours today for under $50 at surplus closeout or EBay before they're all gone!" The Toys-R-Us nearest to me has one QX3+ left (now with my name on it) at $30, so I hope it really does work under Linux. And it's a lot less complicated than building a Scanning-Tunneling microscope.
They are great for quickly examining thick-film hybrid circuits. Much better than straining your eyes on a conventional scope when you don't have to.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Correct me if im wrong but didnt UNBC start this project almost 30 years ago? Talk about unexpected project delays!
Bitch you KNOW the side.. WORLD MAFUCKIN WIDE..
First, Intel's official position on Linux support: CPiA chipset inforrmation which the QX3 uses for its imaging. Note that there are still some problems getting everything working right. Back up your kernel.
If none of the above works, try some more generic hacks with the CPiA driver. It seems the biggest problem is getting the lights turned on...
Anybody know if this works under linux?
Which chipset are they using? ov511?
Just making sure it'd work before I grab one.
I wonder why Myers in Melbourne (Lonsdale St) is still selling it at A$249 (around US$125). That sounds pretty steep compared to just US$50. Oh well, generally electronics is Australia retails for much higher than their US counterparts anyway. Does anyone know why? Even GST won't inflate the prices so high. I've now resorted to buying stuff from Estore. They seem to offer the best prices i can find in Melbourne. They don't stock the QX3 though.
Leading the wild into the ways of the man... http://www.sixthseal.com Something wicked this way comes
I work in a plant growth research lab, and we bought one of these to get real time images of protoplasts (plant cells in culture). It was cheap, and produces surprisingly good-quality images. Of course, we also got a $100,000 Bausch & Lomb scope to do more "serious" work...
Freedom: "I won't!"
The "Educators" link above, http://www.rmcain.com/mcama/special/qx3/QX3SeriesI dx.mv only accepts Internet Explorer. Whatever happened to the concept that the web was there for EVERYONE to enjoy, not just the lackeys of Microsoft?
It then kicks you to the Microsoft IE download page.
Funny - I think Opera IS a qualified substitute for the very reasons they think it is not.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
Is an excellent alternative(granted at a higher price). For about $250 and $100 for a higher multiple lens, you can view excellent, high quality magnifications of your specimens.
I am thinking about getting one, but want to see if higher (500x) magnification is going to be available. See www.bodelin.com for details.
I've had an Intel microscope for a couple of years and took pics of a used Biore nasal strip with it.
check them out.
Trolling is a art,
Why? 10x is easier to use and you can look at all kinds of real world objects. You catch some funny looking bug and you can look at him real close up and personal like. You've got a cut on your finger healing? Nothing like seeing that filling your field of view. Now sure, at 400x you can see cells if you prepare a slide. But the real interesting stuff has to stained and prepared properly, those nice micrographs you see don't come without preparation. And you can't just stick a circuit board in there and see if you have cracked traces or cold solder joints.
Bleh!
Might be fun to try?
The National High Magnetic Field Laboratory has an excellent page dedicated to the Intel QX3, including a cool QX3 digital image photo gallery. Definitely worth a look if you're interested in what these little toys can do.
Wintel Allience
I was always intrigued by the microscope when I saw it in the store, but it seemed so Fisher-Price that I figured that it couldn't be all that good. The way it's packaged and marketed makes it look like some cheesy toy, not a real scientific instrument. I guess I was wrong.
Robotiq.com is heavily tested on animals
I second that question!
Intel has its own developer-oriented discussion of the design and development of the QX3.
1 /a rticles/art_3.htm
http://developer.intel.com/technology/itj/q4200
The page cannot be browsed with opera even if you set it to identify itself as mozilla, however mozilla itself can wiev the page flawlessly.However i cannot see any signs of difference between wieving the page in mozilla and wieving it in msIE so assumingly this is only a case of Opera-discrimination.
Is this story one of those new advertisements I hear so much about? Possibly submitted by the person unloading dozens of these on Ebay?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
http://www.intel.com/support/intelplay/discontinue . tm
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
The QX3's software has an interface that can only be called bizarre, however, at least the original version (without the +) installs a Twain driver accessible by standard imaging software (e.g. Photoshop). It includes controls for the lighting and video.
The IntelPlay site has a good QX3 FAQ as well as the product's 3/29/02 obituary. We can only hope they are clearing out stock before introducing the new improved version, but I doubt it - Intel is discontinuing ALL Intelplay toys, not just the microscope. With MTV style advertising like this it's no wonder it failed to find a continuing market niche as a classic toy - it takes longer than a 10 second attention span to do science. Some gross-out photos are here, as well as a comparison of a QX3 vs.Zeiss dissection scope as well as a comparison of the QX3 and another "inexpensive educational toy" called the Pocketscope. The main Pocketscope site talks about how to add video and lighting to their superior optics. Tinkering with, adjusting, modifying and using the QX3 is discussed here, here and here. More places to buy a QX3 before they go universally out of stock are GlobalMart, Erwincomputers, and Amazon.
It just happens that I spent Friday afternoon finally getting my QX3 (I've had for about a year, picked up for about $50 at a supermarket (!) in an after-Xmas sale last year) running on my Linux box.
I'm using a mostly stock SuSE 7.3 distro with the 2.4.10 kernel, the camera built into the QX3 is the same CPiA chipset that many other webcams use. I haven't done the necessary tweaking run the lamps, I just an external light. The "gqcam" program works fine for viewing/grabbing the images.
-- Alastair
Oh crap is that this week? well hey when you read this in aweek, it was a success!!!!!
I have been working on a project with MEMS devices at school for about a year and we would love to be able to view our devices with inexpensive cameras (ie. less than $2000). I have tried on several occasions to use one of these play scopes but have been put off by bad lighting and poor resolution on the higher magnification. Has anyone seen or come up with any mods to improve the performance of the off the shelf microscope? We need to resolve components about 1um on the monitor. I had given up on this, but maybe Slashdot will come to the rescue and save the day!
The QX3 is supported in the latest versions of Macam for OS X. I have not yet experimented with the software, but have heard okay-to-good things about it.
:)
His CVS repository is a little outdated, so download the drivers from the web site.
http://webcam-osx.sourceforge.net/
"All your base are belong to this file I send in order to have your advice."
You get to buy nifty things like this for 'em. Yeah, some might argue that a two year old can't really appreciate a microscope, or a Lego Mindstorms kit, but you've got to start them early, right?
You can see TNT crystalize at 200x magnification?
loply.com
Live ants especially. Any recommendation for low prices for me? Thank you in advance. :)
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
I just went to two Toys R Us stores and various consumer electronics stores. Sounds like they sold out months ago when they were dropped to the $30 quoted in the article for after-christmas closeout.
The CPIA driver works fine with it for Linux, for viewing. Unfortunately, the code to turn the lights off and on has been commented out of the driver due to a buffer overflow.
I've got it running with the RedHat 7.3. I had to merge the driver from http://webcam.sourceforge.net with the drivers in the kernel source and recompile. I tried compiling the driver outside the tree but got bit by a bug in USB link ordering. Once you apply the updates you'll be able to use simple command-line statements to turn the lights off and on.
If you're going to try these patches on RedHat 7.2 or on some other Linux distribution, you'll have to merge the driver on http://webcam.sourceforge.net with your distributions's driver yourself.
For my code and images, see http://graflex.org/klotz/qx3.
Of course, the best thing would be for the webcam.sourceforge.net people and the kernel people to resolve their differences and get the write code for /proc/cpia enabled. Until then, turning the lights on under Linux will be a DIY project.
There are nine positions with them on this list. Go at it if Ft. Meade appeals to you.
i have one of these things, got it as a gift when they first came out. i think its sitting in my closet. anyway.
are there other programs/mods/whatever that are available for these things? looking at bugs will only amuse oneself for a little bit.
while you make pretty speeches...i'm being cut to shreds. you throw me to the lions...a delicate balance.
Windows 2000 drivers are only available from intel through the mail, with 1-2 weeks delivery. Does anyone know where else I could get these drivers? thx.
-ZOD-
I stoped at my local Toys-R-Us, and they were out of the microscope. However I remember seeing one a couple of months back at my local Target. So on my way home I stopped by and they had four at 24.99 each. I only bought one, but if you are interested in putting some up on e-bay, or something like that, and you are in the mpls-stpl area, check your local Target. They can even check with the other Targets in the region and see if there are any others available.
Good luck.
-Rusty
You never know...
Been to Toys-R-Us and seems a lot of people here in Madison, Wisconsin are Slashdot readers.
When slashdot recommends, its just like Oprah!
Most of Ebay's buy it now have sold, the store link in the story has sold out....
Intel would like to thank Slashdot for clearing its warehouses
Almost every appliance I've seen in Edmund is significantly overpriced. No big deal if you just want to grab some lenses or something, but for lasers, cameras, or microscopes, it's best to look elsewhere.
Seems like Intel really missed the boat on this one. They didn't research the school market. Most high school biology books state that a 450x microscope is advised for the labs. I was really hoping they'd come up with a 450x model. If they had, it could have succeeded. Especially if it was priced around $200 or less.
you can get this electron microscope.
Probably more than $30, and no USB interface.
I wish these had been around when I was a proto-geek kid with too much allowance...
especially when I hit puberty and got really interested in microscopic things, if you know what I mean =)
Get off my launchpad!
Back in the bad old days, 1990, I had an Amiga 2000, a DigiView Gold and a CCTV camera. What this boils down to is that I could capture video with this setup. The CCTV was a B/W Vidicon security camera, so the resolution was very good, and the tube noise was averaged out by the slow scan time of the DigiView Gold (not a frame grabber).
I took an empty TP roll and used it as the interface from the camera to my lab grade Boreal microscope. I had several lenses on the camera, I forgot what type I used.
I took several great 8 bit gray pictures at 768x480 (that's like max NTSC overscan, IIRC) of stuff I could find, like feathers and the premounted samples that came with my cheapie Sears microscope.
Worked well for a while. I know I blew away people at the time with this stuff.
I really regret selling my 3000 (that probably had the pictures from the 2000 on it)... Why oh why didn't I backup to 1.44 floppies back then???
Can someone tell me how, under Windows, to spoof the driver into thinking I've a Pentium 4 processor?
In the literature accompanying mine, it actually specifies that with a Pentium 4 processor, you get better resolution at higher magnifications, additional effects, and faster screen refreshes. I'm sure it's a deliberate screw up of the software if it doesn't detect a Pentium 4, (or other Intel processor, I suppose) and that pisses me off.
In fact, I can see the artifacts that are artificially added on the screen. There's a spattering of pixels that appear "dead" on screen: they're always some obviously wrong color that's slightly "off" what you'd otherwise expect to see at that point, and the "dead" spots don't move at all when the underlying target images are moved.
Artificially screwing up the quality of your products for AMD customers won't bring customers back, Intel! In fact, it does quite the opposite for me. Assholes.
Thanks to Slashdot - all those geeky QX3 microcope are GONE.
J&R Electronics has 100+ units in stock (the salesguy wouldn't say exactly how many) as of 9:30 AM EST Monday morning for $49.88 each plus shipping of $4.95...
J&R Electronics has 100+ units in stock (the salesguy wouldn't say exactly how many) as of 9:30 AM EST Monday morning for $49.88 each plus shipping of $4.95...
Friday I was looking into getting a microscope. Some of the video ones at Edmund Scientific cost over US$500. This is a bargain!
Thanks, Slashdot!!
I went by Toys R US and they wanted 100 dollars for the units, Aparently they had been on sale before, and even though they had quite a few units in stock, some with dust on them, they still retailed for 100. Disapointed, as that seemed to be to much money for me to spend to get one :(
hmm, maybe too expensive for what you get out of it, hard to say. The site tells the truth about the hardware, saying it is less sensitive than ccd (low surface area sensitive to light), noisy (snow due to differences between pixels), and so on. But it might be neat to try and hook it up to your telescope if you already have one.. vcr image stacking software is available on the net. Anyone tried it?
Would someone burn me a copy of the win2k drivers and snail mail me a copy? I asked for a copy on the web site but it never arrived. I was going to ask again but I just moved and can't find the part number off of the original CD that they want. The kids love this microscope but I can't dual boot every time they want to use it. (Linux content: none). Thanks, jabraham@ucalgary.ca
Neither the QX# or QX3+ are supported by Linux.
The QX3 comes with software for Windows 95/98, and the QX3+ comes with software for Windows 2000/XP. If you have or buy the QX3, you can get a free CD with the upgraded software from Intel; it takes about 2 weeks to arrive. All of this info is available at Intel's web site.
I found the orig CD and filled out the form again on the intelplay site c/w the part number. They now sent me an email that says they are shipping me the drivers. So if they actually arrive I will be happy. If not hopefully someone can help me out. John
I ordered a couple of these microscopes from Erwin for about $30/ea. It was simple to set up and use under Win2k, although the software is definitely geared more toward kids with cutesy sounds and graphics. I put a few photos online