Microscope holder and lamp for blues harp setup

Cheap microscopes are basically a web camera with a different lens - not much to do wrong on these (it is just reuse of web camera parts), apart from the stand which totally sucks for sure. But you can 3D-print a better one :)

I wanted to set up my blues harps for overblows (magically playing semitones on an instrument which lacks them by design) and this includes very precise work on tiny metal reeds inside. So I printed a special microscope holder and RGB lamp for this.

It is important to look at the reeds exactly perpendicularly with light coming from the other side - this way you can see how much free space the reed has to move (and you want to minimize this space to make it more responsive). While it can be done using just the naked eye, this special microscope makes it much easier to know exactly what needs to be done.

You can print the holder very exact but the microscope itself might have the optics mounted slightly off axis and you have to compensate for this - it is what those three screws are for. That black-yellow cone thing can be used to check this with incredible precision.

You can find some related software on my github: https://github.com/vaclavhanzl/microscope