The Barbie-themed microscope light I built from an angel eye LED ring worked fine for the last six years (!), but a much brighter ring with 60 aimed 5 mm LEDs for $17 delivered from a US seller caught my eye:
Although this ring looks much more professional, it didn’t quite fit the microscope, being designed for a round snout rather than a squarish one. This snout has a 47-ish mm threaded ring intended for filters & suchlike, so I built an adapter between that and the 60 mm ID of the LED ring:
The ring came with three long knurled screws which I replaced with much tidier M3 socket-head screws going into those holes:
The part going into the snout threads is deliberately (honest!) a bit small, so I could wrap it with soft tape for a good friction fit. The Barbie Ring didn’t weigh anything and I wound up using squares of double-sticky foam tape; it could come to that for this ring, too.
The adapter features a taper on the bottom for no particularly good reason, as the field-of-view tapers inward, not outward:
Seen from the bug’s POV, it’s a rather impressive spectacle:
The control box sports a power switch and a brightness knob. Come to find out the ring is actually too bright at full throttle; a nice problem to have.
That was easy!
The OpenSCAD source code as a GitHub Gist:
