A cheap, powerful digital microscope using your smartphone and an old laser pointer

There is little reason anymore to buy one of those toy microscopes from the hobby shop for your budding biologist. To observe all that the microworld has to offer, the focus has shifted from the scope, to the camera. In other words, instead of trying to rig a camera to an existing scope, it now seems to make more sense to just build the scope around the camera. A cool project to build a high-power digital microscope, using an iPhone and the focusing lens from a cheap laser pointer, recently showed up on the Instructables website. Ten minutes and twenty dollars may be a little bit optimistic, but the video below does make it look easy.
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