 So what you are looking at is not the opening to a 9 inch nail video. So tomorrow my daughter is turning 6. And so I had to get her a gift, obviously. Let me start off by saying this is not a product placement no one's paying me or has asked me to do this video. This is just a random little thing I got off Amazon, I think lots of different companies make them. It cost about 20 bucks. My daughter is very into bugs and insects and picking apart leaves and stuff like that. So my wife and I talked about getting her a microscope and when I was a kid I had a microscope and it was cool. But one of the most annoying things about it was the only thing you could really look under it is the slides that it came with because the light came from behind. So if what you were looking at wasn't transparent or at least translucent you couldn't look at it in the microscope. And looking on Amazon, most of the microscopes, the reviews for the cheaper ones were pretty poor and getting a decent one was fairly expensive and would probably still have the problem that I was talking about with not being able to look at much under there. There wasn't much space. So I thought I'd get her one of these. It is a digital microscope that you hook to your computer through USB, it was like I said it was $20. There's a bunch of them on there and they're different names, I think they all look kind of the same. And I really didn't think it was going to be all that great, but it is awesome. Even if I didn't have my daughter, if I knew how cool this was I would have bought one a long time ago. Let's have a quick look at it. Again, if you just type in USB microscope this will come up. It says it zooms your image from 40 to 1000 which a lot of actual microscopes say 4000 but a thousand magnification is amazing. I've already opened this, I've already played with it but here's what it comes with when you open it. You've got your webcam which I'll talk about obviously and that's all it is is a webcam that has magnification on it. It also comes with a little stand which is very flimsy and I haven't really used yet and I don't think we'll be used much and of course a little CD. Now what do you do when you get a product like this with a CD that has software on it? That's right. The first thing you do is put this in the garbage because you don't need it. You shouldn't need it. Your operating system should take care of drivers for almost all hardware you need and the software on this is probably pretty crappy. Saying that, let's talk about the device itself. As I said, it's a webcam. It's just a basic webcam that has zoom functionality so you can use any webcam application. You can, we'll look at a few today. I like using MPV which is my regular media player but you can use cheese or other webcam applications. You can probably use whatever video conferencing software and conference with this obviously to show people stuff. But this thing is so much cooler than I originally thought. So first, when I first plugged it in and I opened it up using MPV, everything looked very scratchy. I was like, oh, is the lens scratched? No, it has a little cover here. So let me turn off my autofocus here, manual focus and turn in here. So you can put things in here so you can take it and you can put it on any surface as you were just looking at images of my hair and teeth and stuff. But if you had like an ant or something, you could put the ant in there and close the cap and now you can look at it. If you look in there, it's just a lens with a bunch of LEDs around it. There is a knob on the wire here to control the brightness of the LEDs. This silver knob here controls how much it zooms from 40 to 1,000. It came with a USB, what is that, A to a USB-C adapter so you can plug it into a newer phone or tablet, which is awesome. I'm keeping this because my daughter doesn't need it. So it's a little OTG cable basically without the cable. But one of the coolest things, I did not know this existed. So you have the basic USB connector here. But look at that, look inside there. I've never seen this before. Maybe you have and you're not impressed by it, but I am. You can plug this into a regular USB or you flip that down and it's USB micro. So you can plug it into a computer or a tablet or phone or use the adapter for newer tablets or phone. This thing is amazing. I haven't plugged it into my tablet yet, but I would think that I'd be able to do that and it would give me the ability to use this with whatever webcam application I have on my tablet. So again, besides that being extremely cool, this thing magnifies very well as you saw in those opening shots and we're going to do more here in a moment. And it's just plug and play. It's a webcam. If your device can't handle a webcam, I don't know. You're running DOS or Windows 93 or Windows 95. And the only thing that didn't work out of the box, and I saw it in the work is there's a button on the side here that says Zoom, which I'm assuming is actually, no, it says, yeah, it says Zoom, looking at backwards in the camera here. It says Zoom, which I'm assuming is for a digital zoom in the software, which you can do with software. Just this button doesn't work. And on the other side it says Snap, which I assume is for taking a picture, which with MPV, there's a key presser. If you're using cheese, you can, you can press a button, take a picture. Obviously it'd be nice for you to work. I was really hoping that this would show up as a hidden device, like a keyboard, which when I plug it into my Linux machine, my Debian box, it does show up under Dev, Input, and if I search by ID, it definitely shows up. But I'm not getting any signal from it when I press those buttons, when I cat it out, Raleigh, cat out the raw information. So I was hoping I'd be able to use Bash or a Python script to run a signal to take a picture or do a digital zoom, but that doesn't work. That's the only drawback so far. Let's play with it some. Okay, so real quick, you know, one program that's very easy. I've plugged in the microscope, but a program I like to use just to check web cams as cheese, open them up. It's not the best software in the world, but it's fun and quick and easy to test things out. I find that it lags a little bit, but you see right now, let me put my finger on there so you can all see my fingerprint. You notice that there's a bunch of white dots and scratches. And again, I thought that was the lens, but that's just the cover that you can put on there to put stuff in, and I can pop that off. And now we don't have that problem, I can put my finger back there now. And yeah, there's always a little bit of a lag with this web cam, but very much in cheese. But cheese makes it very easy to take photos and videos and do effects. So there's my fingerprint with a bunch of different effects. So that's quick and easy. You might have that installed already, you can give that a try. Another common application that you can use is the GUVC viewer or view. It's in your repositories and I got a tiling window manager here. Let me go ahead and click on this, bring both screens up at the same time. There we go. So you can see there's a lot less lag as I'm moving around. You're getting a better frame rate here, and it's pretty instantaneous. So just cheese tends to run slow, but this program is awesome. There's my fingerprint. It's like, look at what's that thing on my finger there? It looks like a little crystal or something. Let's look at the hair on my head. So there, you just zoom until you get in focus right there, and then I can zoom in more if I want and get a closer look. Look at that, that's the hair on my head. It looks so much thicker than it is in real life. And the light is set pretty low now. I can turn this knob and turn the light up. And there you can see it's much brighter now, so you control the brightness. And of course with this, you can capture images and videos as well. Let's go ahead and kill out of that. If you want to use something like MPV, which I use, we can say video on. So what you would do is MPV, AV, colon forward slash forward slash. This is a U4L2. That's a common library for working with camera devices and video input devices on Linux. So basically just saying we want audio video from this type of device. Which device is it? Video, dev video, in my case is zero. Now again, just like drives, there's going to be a different number there. It's the only webcam I have hooked up to my desktop. If you had another webcam that was plugged in first, that might be zero and this camera might be one. So you might have to change this number at the end to get the correct webcam if you have different webcam. So you hit that and give it a second. And there we go. We have our webcam and this is, oh, that's disgusting. I tell you, you want to see something really disgusting. I won't show you. This is, it's been a day since I shaved. These are the hair follicles on my face. Hold on. The hardest part is when you're pointing it at yourself or something, figure out which way is up and down while you're trying to move it. Oh, look at that. Can I get up there? Look at that. You can see where the razor cut the hair. You can see where the razor cut the hair. That is so cool. And this is coming in pretty clear. Again, I'm doing a screen capture of a video capture. So I don't know what my frame rate is like in this final output, video output. My skin, it just, I'm not going to do it, but stick this thing in your ear. It is disgusting. I don't care how many cotton swabs or cleaning stuff you use. Your ear is disgusting. This is my wrist here. And let's look at my shirt. Oh, you know what? I should change my shirt. You say I had a shirt, but this is just a red shirt. So you can see the follicles. So we were just looking at this red shirt I'm wearing, but here I got, I got this shirt with Wolverine printed on it. And then this one I was wearing yesterday, I got this at an open source conference for an open source software conference. And the ink on this looks like cheese. So let's go ahead and have a look at that. So first, first we'll look at the Wolverine shirt. Let's see what, this is what the basic gray follicles, let me focus in there by turning the big silver knob. There we go. So that's the hair, the follicles look like. Let's look at the red ink. So you can see the red ink painted on the gray and there's the yellow ink around the red lettering and it just looks like paint splattered on there. Now let me get that other shirt that I got at the conference from Chef, I don't know, serving up the light. I think it says, I don't know, some company. Let's look at, look at that, look at that yellow ink, that yellow orange ink. Doesn't it look like melted cheese? Like you're looking at nachos or something? I don't know why I get such a kick out of this and then the fibers from the shirt are sticking through that. So they look like, looks like hair stuck in nacho cheese. Let's see, that's the orange-ish. Here's some gray ink on the gray shirt. Oh, look at that. You can see the little bubbles and any cracks in it. I don't know, I just get such a kick out of this. You guys may not be enjoying this as much as I am. Here is some black ink on the gray. Can I get that in there? I guess it kind of looks, it's a faded black. So I guess you can see a lot of the gray around there. Is there a better, yeah, it almost looks just looks gray. That's probably just the brightness of the light. What happens if I turn the light down? I hope my daughter's going to love this because I love it. Yeah, so that's the black ink compared to, yeah, I guess you can see the difference. The black ink almost looks gray through this, but there's the gray. And there must be black follicles in there because this is just a gray part of the shirt but you can see the little black follicles. But they look like hair coming through cheese over here. You just got to turn the knob slowly. There you go. We'll zoom out some. What does it look like? Zoomed out a little bit. So there's a little bit further away. Look. Oh, yeah, nice nacho cheese right there. Ha ha, beautiful. So since we got her that, we also got her some slides that are meant for microscopes. I was a little concerned about, you know, since even the cheap microscopes claim 4,000 time magnification. This is only a thousand. Will these work? And I've only played with a few of them. Some of them work better than others and I actually have another package coming in for her with more slides that have more animal parts. But there's a few in here that's like a bee leg or a honey bee jaw. And those look awesome. So I'm going to pull out one or two of those. It's in a nice little box with all the slides. And I'm going to place them on this white paper, which is just like a list of everything in here. So it has a white background. And we'll have a look at some of those. Okay, here we go. So this is a, I believe it said, yeah, honey bee worker leg. So we'll have a look at this, focusing on that. That looks cool. And again, the most awkward part about this is if, depending on how you're holding the camera, up might be down, down might be up, so you've got to hold it a certain way. And it seems a little upside down. Like you would think that you would want the knob to zoom in and out to be on the top because that's how the words are positioned. But now if I move up, the camera moves down and the other way around as well. So I'm going to turn it this way. So it gets a little confusing, trying, like if you want to move up, down, left or right, you might be going the wrong way, but it takes just a little getting used to. But look at that. Look how cool that looks. My daughter is going to love this. And when she collects ants, she'll be able to put them in there and look at them live crawling around. Look at that little claw there. Let's see. There's another piece here. Honey bee mouth parts is what this one's called. And let's see, let's zoom in a bit more. Can we zoom in more? Look, we can get even closer. Look at that. That looks cool. So I don't know if you guys are into this sort of stuff. I know I think this is awesome. It's just looking at stuff in a different way that your eyes can't see makes it so neat. And I know my daughter's going to enjoy this if you have kids or if you just like the sort of thing. Again, not a sponsored video. I'm not telling you what brands go get. But just go on Amazon and search USB microscope. It was like $18 or $19 with free prime shipping. Let's see. I think that the light's so bright it's reflecting off the glass. Let's turn the light down a little bit. Yeah, that didn't really help turn it up all the way. So I got a little reflections off the glass there at this magnification. But still super cool. I also know I was actually thinking about getting something similar to this for soldering. I know a lot of people use probably higher quality than this. They probably would say, oh, you got that cheap, old $20 thing. This is pretty cool. I don't know if it would help with soldering. But you know what? Let me grab. Let me grab. I got one right here on my desk. An Arduino Nano, or at least a clone of an Arduino Nano. Let's have a look at some of this stuff on here. Oh, look at that. Again, up and pull it this way. Focus in. Focus. Oh, look at the solder on that pin. That looks... See, I'm a horrible solderer. You can see the gaps in the solder there. Let's zoom out a little bit. Zoom out, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out, zoom out. Right there. Oh, yeah, that's a horrible soldering job. That's me. I did that. Oh, this side looks a little bit better. Maybe. If I focus. Maybe once I focus. Yeah, that's a little bit better. Pretty bad right there. Look at the breadboard a little bit. Right now, we're just looking at stuff. We're done with the tutorial part. We're just looking at cool stuff. So that's the breadboard, a little pin on the spot on the breadboard. Here's a... Oh, this is a... That is a close-up of an IR receiver. Let's look at the chip. Oh, what is this chip? Oh, look at that. That's cool. Okay, I'm going to end this video here because I could do this all day long. You guys are probably bored watching me do it, but it might be fun for you to do it. So go out, check it out, and play with it. I do thank you for watching. Visit filmsbychrist.com. That's Chris at the K. There's a link in the description. As always, I thank you for watching. If you enjoy my videos, go to patreon.com forward slash mail x1000. This is my mouth talking. That's my lip. That's disgusting, and my teeth. Yeah, filmsbychrist.com. Chris at the K. There's a link in the description. Also, a link to my Patreon page. You can also support me through PayPal, and if you can't support financially, think about supporting by just sharing this video, liking it, and subscribing. You guys want to look up my nose? I know you guys want to look up my nose. Oh, okay, maybe we shouldn't be doing this. Thanks for watching. Have a great day.