Amateur Microscopy
You can find these old digital microscopes on eBay for under $20. Here’s a blog that catalogs some of what you can see with them – “Last week, I got myself a toy I’ve wanted to play with for many years — the Intel Play QX3 Digital Microscope. When I was a kid, the old medical microscope my parents bought for me at a garage sale was my favorite toy. I would spend hours putting whatever I could find underneath it… and now, with the digital microscope, I’m doing it again as an adult. I am adding new pictures every day and will continue to do so until I run out of things to look at with the microscope”… [via] Link.
Awhile back we made our 
A MAKE reader writes in about some DIY film gear projects: “Today’s posting on Self-Reliant Film considers the pros and cons of DIY film tools, along with a compilation of a number of links (and a reference to the “Crafter’s Manifesto” found in Make)!” The article has a pretty good overview of many of the film gear projects we cover here, including the 
Handy how-to from Gadgetopia “Being on a budget, we got two things for our business: the smallest conference room we could reasonably get away with, and the cheapest decent projector we could find. This means that the projector is pretty big, and takes up an entire end of the conference table. I needed a way to mount it to the ceiling, but projector mounts run between $100-$200. They typically come in two types: Spidery-Articulated-Aluminum-Dealie and Pole-With-A-Mounting-Plate. One of the Pole-With-A-Mounting-Plate products I found on the net claimed, “mates with any 1 1/2 inch pipe” in its description. That sent me to Home Depot, and I came up with this rig for about $40. Read on for a rough how-to.” Thanks 
Matt writes “The stereoscope used lenses to make each eye see a separate image. It was wildly popular. In some ways it was the first “television,” found in the living-rooms and parlors of every self-respecting European and American family. 168 years later, the same basic principle is still used to create 3D movies and photographs. Here I’ve created my first stereo pair” 
“The basic idea for the single use digital camera is to take your “27 pictures” or so, send the camera in and they send you a CD with your photo’s. Kind of lame, but unique. However, you bought the camera – keep it! There are three different methods to making this camera “last forever”. You do not need to do all three of them, choose the method that will be cheapest/best. You may have a few of the items at your disposal already, so take a look at the required parts for each section, then choose which rout to take.” Thanks Star! 
Brian writes in with the best and only resource I’ve seen that has most of the Head Mounted Displays / VR-Helmets in the market – “No instructions on how to make your own, but if you were going to make your own, you’d probably want to start here…” 