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Hi folks, Dave here. In this video
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I will use a microscope to look at
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Nicarum wire and 12-volt automotive car fuses burning out with DC power fed straight from the solar panels
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outside my workshop. Once when I was building a solar power charging circuit, I accidentally blew a 12-volt car fuse with over 100 volts DC
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Of course, this is not a recommended use for automotive car fuses, but that's another story
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I also use a lot of nicrome wire to make solar panel driven heaters and ovens, and I'm curious about what
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Nichrome looks like up close, when it gets hot, or perhaps too hot. In order to get this kind of footage
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I need a microscope. Let's have a go with this JoyLens Model JL246 MS Digital Microscope
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It was sent to me for review, but I don't get commissions for sales. I'm going to use this microscope in my research here in the Solar Workshop
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and I'll also give my opinions on it. This microscope comes with a lot of accessories, including a remote control
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which is really cool because you can turn the recording on and off without bumping the scope
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and messing up the footage. It comes with a box of slides to observe
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These are just different specimens that you can look at under the high magnification lens
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This is a stand for those slides. This has an LED inside of it which is used for eliminating the slide from underneath
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It comes with spare hardware, spare screws, an Allen key, a pair of tweezers, three different lenses with a box to keep them in
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It comes with a 32 gigabyte SD card. It comes with several different cables, including this USB cable
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It also comes with a HDMI cable for observing HD Video. It can actually output HTML directly from the microscope
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The microscope also comes with a USB power brick as it's powered by 5-1
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USB which has an additional control built right into it you can turn the lighting on and off
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it's very handy it has dual spotlights right here these are used for eliminating what
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you're looking at you can also change the brightness level of the spotlights if you need
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to or you can just turn them off I usually leave them on what I like about the
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spotlights is you can aim them wherever you want get the lighting just right when you're using a high magnification lens it can be incredibly difficult to get the
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lighting the way you need it so having two lights that can come in from two different
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directions is actually extremely handy. This microscope is pretty well accessorized for the price. It has a lot of features. It has three different main
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lenses that you can swap out on the bottom and the first one is kind of intended
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for micro-soldering as you can see here. The second one they say it's for coins
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stones and plants. Actually I found a use for all three of these and you can use
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them in a lot of different ways. Then they have the 1800 to 2040x lens and some of
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that is digital magnification not optical and that's used for a biologic slides but again I found a use for that in that I was able to look at fuses and
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Nichrome wire with it it's incredibly difficult to do but it does work and the
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focus is through both a manual course and fine focus wheel those work pretty
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good I didn't have a problem with them and you can see here it's just telling you
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the focus range for each lens for example the lens a 18 to 720x is 12
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millimeters to 320 millimeters and that makes it very very versatile and I do like the fact that the stand is made out of metal everything here is metal and it really impressive it
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appears to be aluminum alloy machine aluminum alloy it does have HTML
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video out digital video it also has a USB connection very powerful microscope
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it can do a lot of different things and here it says it can be a biological microscope and of course this is very educational you can look at slides it
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actually comes with some prepared slides it's really nice that the they threw those in. I really appreciate that. This would be a great educational tool for kids and the family
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The remote control is very useful. It is a challenge keeping a microscope like this focused and steady when it's at a high magnification
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And so the microscope should have a remote control. And it comes with a lot of accessories. I'm very impressed with how much stuff they give you
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It took me about 30 minutes to put this microscope together and get it up and running. The assembly is very easy and there's a quick start guide included in the box
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So one of the first things I started looking at was these 12-volt DC automotive car fuses because I use a lot of them, and I'm very curious about what they look like up close
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The lenses are held in place by two thumb screws that are threaded into the side of the assembly
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This wheel on the top of the microscope is sort of the coarse focus adjustment. It raises the entire assembly up and down
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The fine focus is handled by the thumb wheel, which is on the lens part itself
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You can also adjust the reach or extension of the microscope forward and backwards by adjusting the thumb screw
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You can adjust the height up or down. And there's this slide ring here with a thumb screw which allows you to set a stop or a limit for the upper down adjustment
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And the remote control is really nice because I can go ahead and hit record and I don't bump the screen
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If I do anything to touch this microscope, even if there's an air current blowing past the sample
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it will cause it to go out of focus or shake the picture. If you just hit OK on the remote control, what will happen is it will start recording without ever touching the microscope, and that's very, very handy
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It also lets you change settings on the screen without any problem, and you can do that really quickly without changing the focus or without bumping the scope
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And I really like that, too. So I proceeded to start playing around with this microscope and trying to see what kind of images I could get
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This is a piece of nichrome wire. Here I'm using the lens that they refer to as 1800 times of magnification, although I can't verify how much magnification I'm getting here
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I can say I'm not using the digital zoom, just the optical. I did not have a suitable device to hold the wire in place, so I just improvised using some pliers, and it was quite difficult to get the focus right
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Here's a clip recorded at 1920 by 1080, which is full HD at 60 frames per second
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I did not test the 2K and 4K resolutions because I'm not. I don't really produce videos in anything more than HD right now
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This is brand new, fine, nicrome wire at 1,800 times opt-wale magnification connected to the
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1,200 watts of solar panels outside my workshop. And let's have a look and see what that looks like
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And here's the view from the 7-inch LCD screen. I've never gotten to see any of my nicrome wire up close, especially while it's glowing
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Here it is again full screen, 1920 by 1080 at 60 frames per second
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Here I actually trying to get it refocus while it lit up and I was somewhat successful in doing that although I wish I been able to keep it in better focus And here what it looks like when the Nichrome wire has oxidized it forms a
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protective oxide coating on the outside of it and you can actually see what that
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looks like really up close I've personally never seen this before. Unfortunately, I don't remember which lens this was
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It's a lower magnification lens. I wanted to get some more footage. So here's some footage of Nichrome burning up
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Back to 1,800 times magnification. Here it is again at half speed
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Here's the end of the Nichrome wire after it burns off. You can see the outside layer and then you can see all the molten blobs of metal that are on the very end. Again, this is like very, very fine wire. This is some of the finest wire I have. And unfortunately, I could not get the focus the way I wanted. It's extremely
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I should have tried moving it around from different angles, but I was really, really pressed for time
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It did not have enough time to get any perfect image. However, again, I've never seen Nykrum up this close
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Here's what Nykrum looks like when it's starting to burn apart and then I'm going to light it up again
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The images you're seeing here were recorded by someone that does not have the freedom or liberty to zero in on quality
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But you can see with some effort, I mean you can get images like this that would not be possible without a microscope
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When something is at an angle or it's not flat, it can actually be really difficult to get a good focus
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and it's just something I need to keep practicing it and learning so I can get better results
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Okay, so what I did next is I hooked some 12-volt automotive car fuses up to my 1,200 watts of solar panels outside and try it burning some of these feces out
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of these fuses out. First attempts didn't go so well. It was early in the morning and there
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wasn't a lot of power on the solar panels, but you can see what happened here. It looks like some
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of the metal vaporized off of the top. You can see a little bit of smoke, but it didn't blow the fuse
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And I tried it again later and this time the fuse blew, but unfortunately I couldn't really catch it on camera
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which is a shame. After I blew the fuse, I had to refocus because everything moved and I was
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able to see the end of the fuse where the metal was you can see where it vaporized
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And I believe here I using the digital zoom so 2040x with optical and digital zoom together
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Here's another attempt to record a smaller car fuse blowing at 120 frames per second at 720p
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still very hard to catch that kind of an event on camera. By the way, all these clips were filmed early in the morning with low sun exposure
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so the voltage was quite high, but the current. was fairly low. For this recording I switched back to 1920 by 1080 at 60 frames
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per second and I got a really close tight view of a fuse. Now the fuse is going to
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vaporize and it came out pretty well at 60 frames per second and 1920 by 1080. I was
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able to capture a small DC arc on camera here. You can see it right there in the picture. The big arcs just white out the footage and you can't see anything. I must say
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that looking at this stuff starts to get a bit addicting. Here's what's left of the fuse
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You can see that it's all vaporized and that's what's left. I struggled to capture an arcone
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camera because it just whited out the footage. So what you just saw previously? I'm very thankful
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that happened. So what do I think of this microscope so far? Not being an expert at microscopes
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I haven't had one since I was a little kid and that was a standard microscope, very, very small
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This is the first digital microscope I've ever used. I think it's workable. There's a
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a learning curve to it. Doing high magnification work does take some patience. If you touch the
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screen, it will certainly move and it can mess up the focus if you're not careful. I found this
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microscope very easy to use. Once I figured out how all the features worked, I just had to work
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with my technique on getting things focused. I found the coarse and fine focus to be quite easy
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to use. The lens itself has the fine focus, and then there's a coarse focus wheel that is on
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the back of the microscope. And using the two together, you can get a pretty decent picture with not
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too much effort. I'm going to say what I like the best about it is the quality. Everything on here
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that matters is metal. There's a lot of metal on here. All of this is metal. Of course the wheels
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here for the controls are plastic, but even these spotlights are metal. They could have made
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those out of plastic. Even this part of the spotlight is metal. It's all machined aluminum
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So this has the appearance of something that could be around for quite a few years and not break
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and I like that. The screen is really nice. It's good enough to
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see what you're doing. Of course the HD videos that records are even better, but this is enough
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to get you on target to help you zero in on what it is you want to look at. And the remote
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control is really nice because I can go ahead and hit record and I don't bump the screen. If I do
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anything to touch this microscope, even if there's an air current blowing past the sample, it will
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cause it to go out of focus or shake the picture. So if you just hit okay on the remote control
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what will happen is it will start recording without ever touching the microscope, and that's very, very
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handy. It also lets you change settings on the screen without any problem and you can do
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that really quickly without changing the focus or without bumping the scope. And I threw
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this in right at the end. This is what Nicromire looks like when the end has been cut off with
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a pair of diagonal cutters. Taking everything into account, I can recommend this microscope
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wholeheartedly. It does what it says it does. The price isn't out of reach for the average person
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and its use can be highly educational. The JoyLens product link is in the description and again
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I don't get any commission for sales. Thanks for watching and hope to see you next time
