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I recently acquired a new eyepiece to replace the damaged one that came with the Meade ETX-90 telescope I bought at a swap meet last year. I decided it needed to have a web-cam mount so I designed and printed one that is a variation of a previous design for a microscope. It took about 20 minutes to recreate the CAD file in DesignSpark Mechanical, and about 90 minutes to print on Son of MegaMax.

This thing has an odd shape to accommodate the odd shape of the camera. I designed the adapter in two pieces so it could be printed without any support material. After printing the two pieces were glued together with a little super glue.

Unassembled 3D printed WebCam adapter and eyepiece.

Assembled adapter on the eyepiece.

The adapter fits over the barrel of the 32mm fl eyepiece and stays put.

I shot a short video to test it and it works perfectly! The cars driving by are about 1/2 mile away.

If we ever get a clear night I’ll try shooting Jupiter or Saturn and then run Registax to enhance the images.

Files are here: https://www.youmagine.com/designs/web-cam-adapter-for-meade-telescope-eyepiece

I recently acquired a B&L Balplan biological microscope (about $200 on ebay) to look at really small critters and decided it would be nice to be able to record some of their antics. After a few measurements with a caliper and about 30 minutes with Sketchup, the design was ready to print on MegaMax. Initial test results, seen below, look pretty good! The camera is a Logitech Quickcam Pro for Notebooks (seriously, when are they just going to start using model numbers?) that can capture video at 960×720 and 15 fps. The camera is not a current product at Logitech but can be picked up for $10-20 on ebay. The still and video were captured using quvcview running on my laptop (ubuntu 13.04). Logitech’s software works great on Windows. The image below shows “horns” on the head of a pinhead sized bug that was crawling around in my work room. Magnification is 640X!

The adapter design and .stl files will appear on Thingiverse soon.

Since dead bugs don’t move the video is just the focus being swept: