my home-made phone camera mount

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gslab
Posts: 22
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2020 3:33 pm

my home-made phone camera mount

#1 Post by gslab » Wed May 06, 2020 1:24 pm

Hello all,

Yesterday I made a holder for my Motorola G7 smartphone. It sits on the eyepiece holder of my Reichert Microstar IV scope, and does a pretty good job of providing a solid / shake free platform for taking pictures.

It's constructed out of 1/4" tempered hardboard scrap that I had laying around, and a plastic electrical conduit fitting that I picked up at my local big-box home supply store (Menards). Everything is held together with super-glue (the cheap $.99 three-pack from Harbor Freight). The camera lens on my phone is offset from center a little, and protrudes from the base by about 1mm. That made the design and fabrication a little tricky and there was some test fitting of the parts on the scope before gluing to make sure everything was aligned. I tried a number of plumbing and electrical connections hoping to find something that was a good fit, but nothing was close enough. The fitting I chose was a little smaller than my ocular (old Zeiss 12.5 that came as a bonus part with my scope) so I wrapped some 80 grit sandpaper around a deep well socket and removed just enough plastic to me a nice pressure fit.
I over-sized the platform dimensions a little so that I could move phone around to find the perfect location that would ensure a centered image with a uniform exposure. I was really surprised at how little movement it took to degrade the image. If the camera lens was not perfectly aligned with the ocular or square with the ocular I would get purple fringing along the edges of the image and shadows. I was able to make the holder just snug enough to be able to invert the phone without falling out.
There are some issues that I'll need to address.
1) Where I cut the hardboard (especially where I machined out the area where the lenses protrude) is pretty fuzzy with fibers and using it as-is leaves some microscopic sawdust on the optics....a coat of paint should fix that
2) It's surprisingly heavy ( partially due to over-sizing it to allow for fine tuning). Once the wood has stabilized I'll probably remove some (maybe 50%) of the extra wood.
3) I'm not sure how durable it will be. I've never use super-glue with hardboard before and I don't know how strong the joints actually are (they seem strong enough) only time will tell.
4) The ocular I'm using is not the correct one for the scope. I've heard that you can get some color aberrations when mixing oculars and objectives but so far I haven't noticed any. I may do a little more machining on the eyepiece holder to work with my Reichert 10x.
Here are some pics

Image
Image
Image

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daruosha
Posts: 273
Joined: Wed Oct 23, 2019 7:10 am
Location: Tehran, Iran

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#2 Post by daruosha » Wed May 06, 2020 5:23 pm

Gslab,

I cannot see the pictures. Would you revise you post?

Very useful project and build BTW. thanks for sharing your experience.
Daruosh.

gslab
Posts: 22
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2020 3:33 pm

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#3 Post by gslab » Thu May 07, 2020 2:01 am

Hi Daruosha,

I'm not very familiar with using forums, especially adding pictures.
Would you mind trying to open them by right-clicking and selecting "open in new window". and see if that works. It does on my computer.
If it doesn't work I'll try to copy the pics onto the message

MicroBob
Posts: 3154
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 9:11 am
Location: Northern Germany

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#4 Post by MicroBob » Thu May 07, 2020 7:32 am

Hi,
you can use the forum's image host for images of 1024pixel and 500kb each.

Bob
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Mraster2
Posts: 84
Joined: Sat May 02, 2020 7:29 pm

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#5 Post by Mraster2 » Thu May 07, 2020 11:14 am

Nicely done !
I dont have a clever phone but I do have a tablet with a camera, it is a bit big and un-wieldy but I wonder if I can contrive something similar.

gslabs pics are here (I hope ! lets see if this works) :

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WOLwE ... zoXrqAViod

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WToRc ... eU082tuUxZ

https://drive.google.com/open?id=1WMlIU ... OeVpEldpVP

edit :
If you want them to appear in post they need to be enclosed in img and /img tags which seem to have gone missing in your original

gslab
Posts: 22
Joined: Wed Apr 15, 2020 3:33 pm

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#6 Post by gslab » Thu May 07, 2020 1:58 pm

Thank's for the replies and advice.

I would love to be able to look at my slides on a big tablet screen. I think the folks that want to see what I'm looking at would also appreciate the bigger screen) I think the extra weight of the tablet (combined with a holder) would put a lot of downward pressure on the ocular socket, and pull it out of alignment (I already see that happening with my phone). You would just need to compensate for the misalignment caused by the weight.

As far as my pictures go, I may be using the wrong tag. I was using the "insert Image" tag, maybe I should be using "insert URL" tag.

Mraster2
Posts: 84
Joined: Sat May 02, 2020 7:29 pm

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#7 Post by Mraster2 » Thu May 07, 2020 6:21 pm

gslab wrote:
Thu May 07, 2020 1:58 pm
I was using the "insert Image"
Hmmm, curious, yes the "insert image" is the right one to give the img /img bits,
so it looks like maybe google drive does not allow remote linking, perhaps ?

If it is any help : I have used Imgur to host pics in-post on other forums .
(pst dont use photomuckit :!: )

MicroBob
Posts: 3154
Joined: Sun Dec 25, 2016 9:11 am
Location: Northern Germany

Re: my home-made phone camera mount

#8 Post by MicroBob » Thu May 07, 2020 6:59 pm

Your holder looks nice! The KPL-W 12,5 x 18 has an especially wide viewing angle that fits very well to the wide angle smartphone lens.
I have downsized one of your images with Irfan view, Snapseed on Androis would allow this too.
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