So after reading this article in Technology Review, I started wondering whether there was an easy way to use the T-Mobile G1 as a remote microscope. I wanted to be able to build something and use it, along with my G1, to take some extremely close-up photos, which I could then send quickly and easily over email.

The catch is this: I wanted to do this with only stuff I could find around my home. There seems to already be a lot of buzz about remote microscopy, to the point at which companies are actually selling (expensive!) microscope adapters for your camera phone. I didn’t want any of these–if someone is cobbling together a cellphone microscope, I’m assuming they don’t have $375 to spend on a lens. If they did, they could probably buy…a microscope.

So I started to think about what around the house would contain a lens with enough magnification to produce useful images. I wasn’t trying to look at blood cells and whatnot just yet–I just wanted something which could be used for looking at materials, things of forensic interest, cuts and other little traumas, etc.

The solution I arrived at was using the lens from a CD player. These lenses are everywhere–you could even grab one from an old optical drive. They’re generally easy to get at (I plucked mine out of the CD player with needle-nose pliers), and they provide good magnification.

The rest of the build was equally simple–I just took the back off of my G1 and taped the lens over the aperature for the G1’s camera.

Here are some of the resulting photos:

Human hairs imaged by the G1 microscope

A 12 point letter 'e'

A small cut on my thumb...gross, yes?

The metallic end of a USB cable

A millimeter ruler...anyone know how to use this to calculate magnification?

Next step would be to incorporate a second lens to get higher magnification, since at the moment this is really more of a glorified loupe than an actual microscope.

Please share your thoughts!

Other Stuff android microscope, cd player lens, cellphone microscope, diy microscope, g1 camera, g1 lens, g1 magnification, g1 microscope, remote microscopy

Ever since I discovered the Android Unlock Pattern, I’ve been trying to come up with a creative way to get around it. I’m sure there are plently of snazzy software ways to do this, but there’s an even easier one–use smudges.

Especially after you’ve made a call and held the G1 up to your face, some grime inevitably builds up on the screen (eww!). When you run your finger over the screen to unlock the phone, it ends up leaving a surprisingly clear fingerprint trail behind. If you hold the phone up to a light or a window and tilt it around enough, you can generally see the patterns of fingerprints on the screen. Unless the person using the phone did a lot of scrolling around after entering their unlock pattern, it’s also usually possible to clearly see their pattern as a nice little trail of disrupted grime on the screen.

Several people have pointed this out in forums, but I wanted to get a clear picture of the problem. Given the reflectiveness of the G1’s screen, however, this proved surprisingly hard to do. Eventually, I ended up placing the phone under a bright light and then photographing it with an SLR, which allowed me to selectively focus on the screen, and not focus on the reflection on the screen, as my point-and-shoot inevitably chose to do. I then made the resulting image negative in Photoshop, ran it through a high pass filter, and messed around a bit with the brightness and contrast.

The result is an image, on which I’ve overlayed the unlock “dots”:

It’s not hugely obvious at first, but if you look closely, you can see a line connecting the dots from the lower left to upper right corners (forming an L rotated clockwise), the correct pattern. It’s a lot of hassle to show something which is really obvious when you’re actually looking at the phone under a light, but you can see the idea.

This begs the question of how to protect your phone. The most obvious solution would be to wipe the screen after each use (or shower/wash your hands more often), but who wants to do that? Another idea is to create a pattern where you double back over lines you’ve already drawn, thus obscuring the actual pattern, even if someone should see its basic layout. The ease of doing this, however, suggests that maybe the unlock pattern isn’t all it’s cracked up to be–how about adding support for PIN entry in a future release, Google?

Other Stuff android hacking, android security, G1 security, hacking unlock pattern, unlock pattern

Welcome to the blog! Recently, I received a T-Mobile G1 as a (solicited) Christmas present, equipped with Google’s new Android operating system. It took about 5 minutes to discover that Android is everything a nice piece of open source software should be–extremely capable yet endearingly temperamental. My first interaction with it–attempting to crop a photo for my wallpaper–yielded a comically huge enlargement of my forehead, plastered across the G1’s lovely Multitouch screen, with a nice friendly-looking analog clock smack in the center of it. This had neither the polish of an iPhone, nor the ruthless efficiency of a Blackberry. I was delighted–it was like carrying Ubuntu Linux around in my pocket!

Ever since, I’ve been experimenting with the G1. In learning about its features, I’ve found other blogs and websites extremely useful. For that reason, I decided to document what I discover, in case other people are Googling for the same things. Enjoy, and please comment!

Other Stuff android, g1, linux, open source, welcome