I had some spare bits left over from all my experimental Telecine machine builds, so decided to make up a quick digital microscope to assist my aging eyes with soldering some of the very small components I'm using.

The Guppy is a bit of an overkill, I expect a decent webcam will do just as well for this application, but it wasn't doing anything useful sitting on my desk! Still, 1024x768 x 30fps uncompressed is quite nice for a microscope :)

I'm using a simple viewer built with ActiveDcam for the PC.

The challenge was to use stuff I already had kicking around. The lens is from the Eumig 610D:

I pressed the lathe into use to turn down an adapter with a C-mount thread for the camera and bored out hole to make a nice snug fit for the lens barrel.

Here's a crop of a screen grab, the steel ruler is graduated in 0.5mm steps

Could easily have gone for more magnification, but for my purposes this is more than enough. But to prove a point, this is within the adjustment range: