Apparently, I Can't Solder | Andonstar AD407 Microscope Review

like many other youtubers andon starr has sent me one of their electronic microscopes to try out on the condition that i make a video about it so let's do that welcome back to cloud 42 i'm james well for those of you who are listening to the audio version of this or who are blind or not very perceptive i'm not 17 years old anymore and my eyes don't focus up close like they used to so i found a number of solutions for up close work i have a pair of safety glasses with bifocal lenses i have a jeweler's visor and for real up close work like surface mount soldering i have a binocular microscope and all those solutions work great for me but they don't work so well for you i've tried a bunch of different techniques over the years of getting good video of up close work i've got a camera adapter for my microscope i've got a macro lens for my camera but really i haven't found anything that i'm really happy with and i've decided i'd like to try an electronic microscope but i'm also not an idiot so instead of trading a large number of dollars for one i went back through my email and found one of the many messages offering to send me one for free and told them i'd take them up on their offer so let's take a look at what they sent and see how it works for my applications this is what they sent this is the andenstar ad407 this is the seven inch monitor version of their digital microscope and this is the one that i was probably going to end up buying anyway if they hadn't decided to send one over for review but this microscope the way this works is you've got a screen unit here on the top and then underneath you have the objective lens with a focus ring there's a uv filter on the end just to protect the end of the lens and then it's on a stand that can be raised and lowered and as far as i can tell raising and lowering the stand is really the only way to change the field of view of the microscope and it's got a couple of little led lights and you can brighten those up and dim them down and adjust them for you know whatever situation you have so i've got a few things here we can take a look at this is one of my electronic lead screw pc boards this is one of the old ones version 1.0 if i can focus that up and i've got the microscope set up right now it's actually recording so any shots that you see full screen of the microscope magnified image are from that recording and i also have the hdmi output from the microscope connected to a larger monitor here for me to see while i'm working now honestly having played with this a little bit the big monitor is beautiful but if it's just going to be me looking at at it the the little 7 inch screen is just fine the other thing that i would probably use the hdmi output for let me turn this camera up so you can see is i generally always have a production monitor running here in the shop and this is just a 4-up display that has my cameras that i'm using so in this case i got a camera over here on the left i got a camera here on the right both of those are being shown here sometimes i'll have a close-up camera or a macro shot or i'll have a long lens set up and so there will be you know something else in the lower corners here or i can you know flip this around and look at you know in particular individual images that i want to but mostly i have this just so that i have some awareness and i wanted to connect the output of the microscope to my 4-up switcher that drives this but for some reason it doesn't work the hdmi output it just says it's out of range it just doesn't like it i don't have any idea why connecting it to a proper monitor seems to work just fine so but in reality i realize kind of in retrospect it doesn't matter because i have the monitor right on the microscope so i don't really need to have another monitor to show me what's happening overall as a package you know it's this is not heavy duty stuff right this is relatively lightweight this is thin aluminum and everything's just held together with thumb screws it is totally sufficient but don't be expecting you know some big industrial piece of equipment this is a little plastic case you know kind of consumer level electronics uh kind of machine that said that's actually kind of one of the things that i like about it this thing is small and light it'll fit in a little space on a shelf when i set it out of the way my big binocular microscope has a big cast iron base it takes up a bunch of space on the table top and it's kind of always there and always in the way when i'm not using it so i'm pretty interested to see over time how this works to have a little tiny thing that i can just pull out use and put away that said it doesn't have a very big stage this pc board like if i turn it this direction this is only a couple of inches long maybe 55 millimeters and if i push it all the way back so that it hits the base i can't quite see the front edge of the board i can almost see it but not quite so it is a relatively limited space though i think it would be pretty easy to build a different stand for this because there's really no reason the microscope couldn't just be on an arm or something out in space there's no reason that you would have to use this base now the first use that i have for a microscope is just inspection here's a good example i've got a pc board here i've got some other items here that we'll look at here in a minute this is again you know one of my early electronic lead screw pc boards and i've played around with moving the lights around so like you can you can get the lights into a position where you can read you can read the chips fairly well this one's actually not very well engraved it's very difficult to read there's another example so you know for it for basic inspection work this actually looks pretty good i can see down to the solder joints pretty well let me grab another board and look at maybe some smaller components adjust the focus here turn around right side up so the electrons don't fall out this is a little soldering practice board that i bought off of amazon i'll throw a link up there if you're interested little 555 timer and a bunch of leds and you know it's just a little blinky circuit that runs things in the circle and has a whole bunch of different size components so over here on the left these are you know 1206 805s and if we get over here these are o603s and o402s and yes this is my hand soldering i soldered this by hand with a soldering iron and a pair of tweezers and yes this is lead-free solder so i bought this because i was i had done a lot of soldering with leaded solder and i wanted to get some practice with a lead free so i bought a few of these practice boards and put them together and you know spent some time on them and with a good temperature controlled iron it's a it's not a difficult skill to pick up it's just you have to work with the surface tension of the metal so it's a lot different from working with leaded solder which is much more forgiving so i got the microscope all the way up at the top right now so the total field of view is about an inch or if you are metrically inclined about 25 maybe 26 millimeters and depending on exactly how square this thing the field of view is actually you know that's that's not super wide the depth of field is fairly narrow if i tilt this a little bit and then try to focus you can see that it's actually pretty easy to get one side of the image nice and crisp and the other side not so crisp so you don't have a ton of depth of field to work with and so this is you know again this is millimeters so you can see that's the widest field of view and if i run this all the way down as far as it goes on the stand and then refocus and the total field of view ends up being what about eight eight and a half millimeters something like that so if i bring back those 0402 components you can get a really nice close-up inspection but in terms of an overview of a larger board or a larger object you're limited to about an inch about 25 millimeters actual width of the frame so that's that's fairly limiting though again from what i've read i think you can actually run this quite a bit higher if you take it off the stand and provide some other mount so that might be something we would do someday and it's small enough and light enough i think it would be pretty interesting to actually make a mount like on a c-stand arm so i could hang this out pointing into a machine to get some up-close shots of the cutting tool at kind of microscope level while the machine is actually cutting so we can try that here's something else that i'll often want to inspect with a microscope which is a cutting tool in this case this is a 1 8 inch so about a three millimeter end mill and we can look at the cutting edges this is one that i used when i made my hobbed bolts and actually this end you can definitely see where there on that tooth let me flip it around let's look at the other end the other end did not fare as well you can see we've got a pretty decent chip taken out of the end of that and from with the naked eye it's actually fairly hard to see a lot of this still learning which direction to turn the focus some goop and junk in there no idea what that is and there's the broken flute just the lighting here yep that end mill is done let's look at a couple more things this is a tungsten this is one of the welding tungstens that i ground last week with my new tungsten grinder and we looked at these briefly under the microscope but here you can see a much closer image and you can see that those scratches really do come down lengthwise on the tip that looks really good and another thing that i inspect a lot is 3d prints so i've got a little benchy here let's throw it under and see how bad it is this is the roof of the benchy so we can see that the printer is adjusted fairly well we're getting a pretty complete fill and you can see some marks and scratches from the uh from the the tool head or the the nozzle moving around while not printing and actually melting and scraping there's the top of the stack that looks really nice let's look down at the deck here looks pretty good looks a little bit overfilled to me but it is uh turning up a nice neat closed top surface without too much overflow take a look at the sides some of these overhang curved surfaces there you can see the seam line where the printing started and stopped pretty consistent extrusion and if we look at the bottom it is definitely overfilled but you know that in this particular case i did that on purpose because i was intentionally trying to make sure that i got it completely smashed down for good bed adhesion on the pei sheet and of course you can see all the scratches in the bottom some of those are from handling but some of those are from marks that are actually on the pei sheet of the printer now one more thing that i wanted to try with the microscope i have been meaning for a while to do a comparison of cheap import power supplies versus decent industrial equipment so this is a meanwell which is a pretty decent power supply brand and i'm just going to pop this open and we'll throw the pc board under the microscope and see what we can see the difference here is that this has some depth to it unlike the little surface mount boards that we were looking at a minute ago and i wanted to see how it does at looking at these and my concern is that it might be a little bit too close yeah so this is the widest field of view that i have and so exploring a pc board like this is going to be fairly difficult i mean we can get down and look at it at an individual component level pretty easily but the depth of field and the field of view is fairly limited for something like this so to be able to pull back and get kind of a big picture view i think this sort of video might be better off with a macro lens so that i can pull it back if we're looking at fine detail we can definitely see the fine detail here but in terms of you know being able to see a slightly larger picture or kind of take a tour of the board or look at the design this is super close i think this would be pretty difficult so yeah it's a little bit disappointing but again if we made a different stand for this thing and raised it up maybe that would work try to get this back in the case the right direction because there are three terminals on the top and three terminals on the bottom and if i reverse those then the 12 volt output will be labeled as ac input and i would have a bad day no doubt i would live because it's a well-designed power supply with lots of safety features but the power supply would definitely not live in addition to just inspection work i also do fine work under the microscope chief among those tasks would be soldering so i've got a pc board here and let's try doing a little bit of soldering i won't get into you know super tiny surface mount stuff today because i don't have anything like that ready to go but we'll go ahead and solder some connectors onto the back of one of these pc boards and so these are just going to be you know these are 0.1 millimeter 2 or 0.1 inch 2.54 millimeter headers and these are pretty small pads because this was one of the earlier designs before i added more surface area for solder contact and for the soldering iron heat so let me turn on my iron here hey let me plug in my iron so i can turn it on now i have to say one of the reasons why i didn't buy one of these sooner was because i was skeptical about the depth perception that i would have this uh is you know again it's just a single lens and so unlike a binocular microscope i don't actually have you know two eyes looking at it i just have a single perspective so am i going to be able to judge the depth perception well enough to do the soldering or not i don't know let's find out okay so i'm already having trello i can't tell where the solder is i probably need to get some flux in here this is not behaving super well that's better trying to do this just by looking at the screen and i keep being tempted to look down at the board yeah i can't tell where the solder is if yeah i can't tell how high it is off of the board so i think for this kind of soldering yeah this is going to be a challenge in a microscope like this wow okay trying to figure out if this is something that i'll learn and pick up pretty quickly or if this is something that's just going to be a problem because under a binocular microscope this is not a challenge in any way because it's just you can just you can judge the depth continuing with this just trying to find out if i am going to pick up any skill from practice here and yeah i think this is getting a little bit better but it's still not awesome i guess i can kind of judge it from the shadow there and this board definitely needs some flux and i didn't bring it out here to the shop when i brought the soldering iron down so that's my bad okay well that was interesting let's try um touching up some joints here on a surface mount board something small and just see if that's any easier to to judge just because there's not as much depth or not let's find out well let's pick r40 there see if we can actually touch up a solder joint again i don't have any flux down here so things are not flowing particularly well yeah see i'm like i'm several millimeters above the board and i can't tell so is this doable yes it's totally doable and if this were the only thing that i had i would totally use it but compared to a binocular microscope and that this is not yeah not super happy with that for soldering i think the binocular microscope would be a much better deal in terms of pricing what these things are between 250 and 300 dollars and a decent binocular microscope is not that much more expensive to be able to do soldering and the depth perception i think is going to be a big deal but boy for inspection especially if it's up close this is a really nice little tool one other thing that i've noticed while working with this is that while there are actually audio options in the menu on the microscope it doesn't actually record audio and i confirmed this with the manufacturer and yeah that it doesn't actually record audio and normally that's not a big deal but for me it kind of throws a little bit of a kink into my process so in addition to the multiple cameras that i track up here on my production monitor i'm also recording audio on an external audio recorder so my wireless microphone receiver feeds into this and so when i edit in post i have to take the footage from all the cameras and in this case the microscope as well and the audio file from the audio recorder and i have to synchronize those all together so that they line up so i can cut between cameras without having to do heroic edits on the audio and so that i have lip sync for the cases where i'm actually in frame and when i do things that make noise the sounds uh line up and the way i normally do that is i record audio on everything and then the software i use adobe premiere pro will synchronize based on those audio tracks but since i don't actually have an audio track coming from the microscope microscope i can't synchronize that based on the audio so what i've taken to doing is just starting the audio recorder and the microscope at the same time so at least there'll be mostly in sync i can make fine adjustments later if there's something that really matters but the other thing is that i don't i don't have the ability to identify the clip unless i put something visually into the frame because normally what i'll do is i've planned out sort of what shots i want and so i'll say okay this is the and star microscope review shot number one and then clap for sync and so i have a nice impulse on all the tracks i can line up and i have audio that identifies what this file is because i'll often end up with 100 gigabytes of files after a day of shooting and i need to be able to identify things so that i don't spend hours and hours and hours just trying to figure out what stuff is but since the microscope doesn't actually have audio that doesn't work so that's a minor issue for my workflow if you were just going to buy a microscope and use it to look at stuff that wouldn't be a problem for you but so what i've been doing is just starting at the same time as the audio recorder that gets it pretty close and then i'll just put my planning sheet underneath here for a minute and look at the particular shot number so that you can actually identify from the clip what it is and that's been working so far i was just looking back here at some footage that i shot previously for other videos of soldering and this was all shot using a dslr camera and a macro lens on an overhead stand and you can see that you know it's pretty clear and it's pretty good but certainly you don't have the up close quality that you get with with the microscope this is really so much clearer the image is bright and colorful right out of the microscope this is really good stuff now as i discovered the depth perception isn't so good so i probably will end up with some other sort of visual mechanism for when i'm working with it you know when i did this work i was actually using a jeweler's visor to see what i was doing and then letting you look through the camera and i'll probably have to end up doing something very similar to that here so if i end up doing any serious soldering i'll use the jeweler's visor so i can see it but use the microscope to get a really nice clear picture and that really is a nice clear picture and in terms of just straight up inspection work i've been pretty impressed with this microscope the clarity of the imagery like actually being able to get really good up close full color bright and clear images this is really good you will definitely be seeing this again on the channel now my purpose in making this video isn't really to sell somebody's product but i would be remiss if we didn't talk about what it costs uh these are running right now for about 276 dollars they're available everywhere including amazon i will put a link down in the video description if you use that link and make a purchase i make a couple of bucks help support the channel if you don't no worries like i said it wasn't really my purpose here to try to sell anything i really just wanted to try these out because i've seen them on a lot of other channels and i really wondered in terms of capabilities if it would solve some of the problems that i was having as a creator trying to produce good quality close-up video and my conclusion is that yeah for some things it's a really good fit for others like live soldering under the scope yeah i could take it or leave it it's probably not going to work out that well for that application that said i think it's a decent tool to have in my toolbox well that's all i have for you today if you enjoy content like this give me a thumbs up feel free to subscribe to the channel and leave me a comment i'd like to know what you think thank you for watching [Music] you

Channel: Clough42

Views: 68,604

Keywords: Review, Testing, Andonstar, Microscope, AD407

Id: DskhvlhwW4c

Length: 25min 56sec (1556 seconds)

Published: Sat Aug 28 2021