Someone turned their old DVD drives into a freaking laser scanning microscope
Living in the future if one thing is clear, it's that digital media is king. In the gaming world, it's becoming far more common to buy games digitally than it is to purchase physical copies. This has been true in PC gaming for years now with the success of Steam, lickety-split SSDs(opens in new tab), and new consoles now releasing without disc drives. While some companies are seeing an increase in optical drives sales(opens in new tab), generally speaking the days of the DVD drive are well and truly over—but what to do with those leftover drives?
DVD drives especially aren't of much use to anyone anymore. Streaming services will often offer better quality versions of the same movies in digital format. Plus, if you're a big physical media fan you've likely upgraded to Bluray or gone the other way completely with your mounting VHS collection. So it's time to gut those DVD players in favour of something actually useful, like a laser scanning microscope.
Kuriuzu recently posted a neat build to hackaday(opens in new tab) which involves turning two DVD drives into microscopes. A fair warning, while this project is described as simple it also requires a bit of soldering and might be confusing if you're new to this kind of work.
An Analogue Discovery instrument was used for this build, so follow along with this guide(opens in new tab). This will do a lot of the heavy lifting, though these devices don't come cheap. It can be done without one but you'll be in for a bunch more trouble. Still, if you've got the parts laying around it's a great inexpensive one to try that should deliver a really cool result.
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