Microscope

Thanks to Karsten Nohl presentation at Hacker Space Fest, there's an interesting DIY approach for reverse engineering.

Now we have to find a microscope...

Friend of Phil will lend a microscope with camera
- not perfect but should enable us to do the first etching/abrasive steps
We'll try to select and acquire a perfect microscope for this job.

Features

These are the features we're looking for:

500x magnification
2 MP to 8 MP camera
Objective table to move the chip slowly (i.e. not by hand, too much shaking and imprecision)
Reflected (incident) lighting

Feature we DON'T NEED:

Confocal microscope (it seems, because we'll abrase/grind away the upper layers anyway and the bottom layers are opaque anyway too)

Still selecting the right model.

Objective table: micro-screws controlled moving plate
Microscope: 640x optical Bresser (lent by Phil's friend).
Camera: 3.2 MP Canon Ixus V3
- Mounting: Attached directly to the eye-piece
- Drawback: produces round (not square) pictures (with no noticeable deformation) of smaller size/coverage than regular microscope-camera.
- Advantage: working and free

Req: 500x magnification or higher
- This one goes up to 640x
Req: 2 MP to 8 MP camera
- The Canon IXUS is 3.2 MP
- Will need to take more photo as just 2/3rd of the picture is usable (round pictures)
Req: Objective table to move the chip slowly (i.e. not by hand, too much shaking and imprecision)
- Poor man setup with micro-screws, TO DO
Req: Reflected (incident) lighting
- Reflected light works at lower magnification with daylight
- Even for microscope which is designed for see-through
- TODO: Need to buy adequate lighting. Got to test with external lighting (HB LEDs?) at higher magnification (640x)