DVD players turned into microscopes

With the advent of streaming services, many people are choosing to forego collecting physical media. In turn, there are now plenty of unused optical drives in parts bins and old computers. If you want to do something useful with this now obsolete technology, you can try turning one into a laser microscope.

This version requires two DVD drives. By scanning once horizontally and once vertically and measuring the light returned from the DVD laser, an image can be created. For this construction, the second sensor is used to move the object itself. The entire device is controlled by an Analog Discovery 2, although this principle can be ported to other microcontroller platforms. Thanks to the extremely fine laser of a DVD and the precise movements of the motors found in the control machines, the images obtained using this method have the potential to be more detailed than comparable visible light microscopes.

Although this is not quite the territory of the scanning electron microscope, it is good enough to clearly visualize the inner workings of an uncapped integrated circuit. Something like this could be indispensable for reverse engineering integrated circuits or troubleshooting other relatively small electronic components, with higher resolutions than can usually be achieved with visible light microscopes. We've even seen similar builds in the past that build microscopes like this as dedicated lab equipment.