Hi Very often when I'm doing tear downs and things, I want to take uh, high-res photos of Pcbs. And for those who don't know, I have a Flickr account. I'll link that in down below and that's where I upload most of my like tear down photos that I do if you see a particularly involved header and I usually like often, take photos as I'm actually going and I'll just dump all the raw images onto my Flickr account all in full resolution. Uh, so you can download those to your heart's content.

and sometimes it's often quite tricky to get good photos of uh, Pcbs like you can see at the moment. We're getting reflections from my overhead lights and you know, on shiny metal can surfaces and stuff like that. And if your lights not at the right angle, you can't read, uh, some of the writing on the chips and things like that, this board's up. You know, fairly good in that respect, but you've seen that on many of my videos where you just can't read the part numbers.

If the light's not at the right angle and it's you know you've got to tilt the board under my microscope to read things. And so most of the time I just like rely on just my regular lights that I've got here. my overhead lights plus my two studio lights that I use either side of me. I'll switch it off.

There you go, There you go. so it just gives extra light in front and if you want to see, I'm getting about there you go. 1900 lumens or something like that on the bench, which is, you know, pretty good for taking fairly decent photos. And this is the camera that I use.

or more particularly, uh, the lens. It really doesn't matter about the body. I've got many uh, Sony cameras that this, uh lens fits. This is a one to one, uh, 30 millimeter macro lens and um, yeah, it works really good for macro photography and you know it gives like nice dimensions.

They're not, uh, distorted or anything like that. but lighting is the real pain in the butt. But often I don't have time to prep and set up a proper shot. so I'll just get my camera and just hold it manually over the top and just press the shutter and just you know, hope it all works And you know that's good enough for Australia, that kind of thing.

But often I want really good, uh, good quality shots of Pcbs and products and things like that. And for products, I probably don't have a wide enough lens here. But yeah, I've got one of these gigantic light tints. It is absolutely enormous.

So obviously, um, if this was designed for shooting like big products, you can get smaller ones and and things like that. And the whole idea is that you put your studio lights like you usually have it closer than that, diffuses the light and everything and you have like a white, uh, backdrop or different color backdrop. whatever you want to use. And then you can get nice evenly lit product photos and things like this.

But in my tiny little lab here this is just like insane. So I almost never go to the light tent effort to do anything So bugger it I thought what I'm going to do is I'm going to construct my own little light box just for like smallish Pcbs. Anything up to like, you know, 20, 30 centimeters, uh something like that be okay for product, uh, shots, low front on product shots and stuff like that. But anyway, I want a nice evenly lit box.

So uh, you want good quality leads for something like this? So what I've got, these are called corn cob uh, studio lights and this one's been ripped apart. And here's all the well, most of the uh guts out of this one. These are Uh, Ug, Lead and Eugene Led as a manufacturer of really high quality, uh, high Cri or high color rendering index leads. so you can buy the individual leads on reels, you can buy the individual strips or you can buy them in finished products like these Corn Cob leads.

And I've got my old studio lights uh which I have down in the bunker at the moment. I've got. um, four of these are corn Cob lights. They're 36 watts each.

so this is the latest model. It's got. uh, there's leads on the front and leads on the side. all the way around like that.

and it's got like an aluminium, uh housing. I don't know. full aluminium. I haven't actually taken this thing apart yet, but this is an older model uh one which I had, so I thought I would steal the leads out of these.

Look at this. this one's actually a plastic, uh, body. and there's the mains converter in there. it just connects down to the main socket and this is a, you know, so this is all plastic.

And they've just got the leads on the metal strips. But these are really high quality studio leads. These have a Cri color rendering index greater than 95. so absolutely superb.

So you'll get great colors in your shots you want. That's the sort of number that you want like 95 plus if you're really serious about your, uh, photography and things like that. So they've got uh, ten leads here. and there's 14 strips of these aluminium.

uh, backed of course. but they don't go on to a larger heatsink so obviously this is adequate. uh, dissipation. And of course, these leads are then, uh, diffused inside the studio light.

The studio light has a big reflector system in it, and then a big, uh, diffuse sheet on the front where the light comes out. So it's lovely. Really nice diffused light. And that's what you want for product photography.

You want nice diffused light coming from all directions. And anyway, um, so these will be top quality leads. and they happen to be already being nice little strips like this. You might think that they're all in series, but if you actually have a look, Yes, once again, got to get the light at the right angle to see this bloody white solder mask.

Unbelievable. But it looks like there's two leads in series and then they're all in parallel. You know, roughly, like a three volt drop for a white. uh, lead.

Like this, roughly. And so we should get, uh, like, a total of a six volt drop on one of these, uh, strips. So I can construct a light box with a whole bunch of these leads like around the outside and maybe some reflective coating material in it. And that should be really nice if we can, uh, surround the board that we are photographing with these leads.

So I'm thinking like a big cardboard box, uh, type thing. You know, maybe about this high or something like that? That'll depend on the focal length of your lens and you know how close you want to get in the field of view and everything else. But yeah, basically on the top. maybe? uh, like just surround it with, you know, a whole bunch of leads.

So light comes in from all different angles and then possibly I coat the internal surface of the cardboard box with a reflective, uh, alfoil or something. And so you know, the light just bounces around in there and just evenly lights everything and then have a hole in the top so you can stick your camera through the box that's all lit up evenly inside and take your photo. That's the plan. Anyway, all right.

So I just got a stripper powered up here and whoa. It is bright. and, uh, highest. Set it to the highest compliance.

Uh, voltage here? Yeah, 32 volts there? Um, because it'll drop. whatever. Uh, voltage. Uh.

particular current. Half an amp? Sounds like. I don't know. Good enough value.

It's really bright. Don't know if it's over doing these leads or not. I don't have a data sheet for them. Oh, I can't see a damn thing.

There you go. Yeah, 2.92 and then total across. Oh well. we've already seen the total voltages on our power supply.

So uh yeah. 5.9 volts for the entire strip? Because there's two Leds in series. Roughly three volts each. So there you go.

Six volts per strip. So I believe all these strips were actually wired. Oh, it's too bright. We're actually wired in our series.

so obviously our converter in including this front one as well. That's probably maybe the equivalent of two strips. is it see the pattern on that? But yeah, it's probably got like, you know, 16 strips, total of 10 leads. So 6 volts.

Uh, total drop for one strip times a 16 if then? yeah, 96 volts. So that's what that converter must be putting out. Or as a compliance voltage. they're almost certainly constant current.

Driver: Okay, please excuse the cruelty of the model. Didn't have time to build it, to scale or to paint it. Ah, I just got an Amazon box here. You know, roughly the right height I tested.

I think it might give me like a 20 millimeters, uh, 20 25 I think. field of view. It depends how high I put the camera on. it can be raised up.

I can, possibly, uh, even cut the sides that they can bend so I can go lower for like, really tiny boards and things like that. I think the minimum, uh, focal length of my, uh, camera lens, uh, combination is like, you know, 20 millimeters or something like that. It can get really close. So because it's uh, kind of tricky to get these things, uh, right.

You don't want to go to town, you know, lavishly building the thing before you actually test it. So yeah, uh, there's just my crude implementation just to, uh, test this, uh, concept. So I've got, you know, two strips top and bottom, there. one strip there and there.

They're just flat. I mean, you could like angle them in towards there, and I've got no reflecting, uh, material at all. So anyway, I expect this to be very bright inside, but it should hopefully evenly light. uh, my board from either direction.

but because there's no reflective stuff and it's not bouncing around, the light's not really bouncing around in there. I do expect some shadows on, uh, like larger components and things like that. So you know on your caps and your connectors and things like that, you'll probably get like shadows and and stuff. uh, coming across the larger parts and that might be helped with the reflective material.

But I just want to try this. Uh, first up and see how it goes. So I've got six strips of, uh, six volts in series, so that'll be uh, 36 volts. I haven't lashed down the wires, I don't haven't done anything yet.

It's it's a bit how you're doing. Um, but we'll see. proof of concept. Let's go.

Alright, so I'm going to have to use my higher voltage supply. I got some white paper on the bottom because you want to have a nice white background when you do those product photos and let's switch this bad boy on, shall we? And so, I've got it set to maximum of 40 volts. but as I said, it's going to be in constant current, but it's going to choose whatever compliance voltage is necessary to give half amps. So it should be about 36 volts and yep, 35.7 near enough so that of course there's no current sharing resistors on those.

Um, as you saw, there's like there's like nothing on there. So they're obviously doing the just, uh, the they're relying on the leads themselves for uh, the current sharing and seems to be working quite nicely. But uh. anyway.

I'm looking down in there that looks really bright. so let's have a look at the pattern as you can see that looks like really nice and even pattern on that on the bottom there. It's not going to be perfect because there's not. uh, reflections.

Of course I still expect those shadows, but let's uh. let's measure the light level there. We have it. Oh yeah.

Eight thousand, uh, three. You've gotta mold it. You hadn't got an extra, Added an extra zero on the end. Eight thousand.

Uh, Three hundred. Uh Lux. Nice. So did I say lumens before? Um, yeah, Lux.

Um, Lux. and this is a Lux meter. Very different. Lumens and Lux are very different.

and I've done a whole bunch of videos with Doug Ford on uh, all that, or sort of different so I have to link those in my case right now. So let's whack our board in and see what sort of photo we can get. But here we go. This is just using the camcorder and well, I can't see this on the Lcd cam called Lcd too well.

but I can see the shadows on the sides of the board. That's you know what I expected. So yeah it's you know, but that looks really nice for a first first shot at this without any reflect internal reflective material that looks really nice. I'm going to take a photo and okay, so what I'm going to be doing is taking a constant aperture of F10 on this thing.

I've set the white balance to 5600 so it's manually set up to match uh, those Leds, so it should be really nice. And yeah, I know I could get like a stand or something like that, but I'm just going to take an overhead shot that'll be good enough. So that's just like one just taking on my bench. Nothing special.

Okay, now at the moment, it's uh, set so that the lens just doesn't go through so it just allows me to sit it on top there so I don't really need to have anything support in it. It's one two hundredth shutter speed. There we go. Okay, what I've got now is a ruler in there and hopefully or can I get close enough bloody microphone on top.

At some point in width, you're going to get reflections of the lights coming up into the lens and this is a factor of the angle of the leads uh, compared to the uh, you know, the height of the camera above the uh subject under test so it looks like you know that's yeah, I can get a wider field of uh view, but the problem is, well, let's leave the camera where it is and I'm I'm lifting the box up. Lifting the box up. Not you still get it off reflective material like that. But let's say I put in something very reflective under here, which is my micro supply screen.

There you go, you can see the lids in there looking straight down. That's actually going to be an awesome product shot that's nicely lit. Yeah, there's still a few shadows in there, but now those reflections were actually coming from the side Leds in this side of the box. So I could actually, you know, wire them individually and then be able to switch them in and out as our needs go.

But yeah, at the moment, I'm getting the side reflections um, from these leads here and here and I've confirmed that if I cover those, then uh yeah, I don't get those reflections off the ruler. So right. So what I'm going to do now is get some our foil. Um yeah, dude, it's a registered trademark apparently.

Alfoil. How dare they? It's an Australian anyway. Um yeah. get some alfo oil and that will provide a, ah, none of that aluminum foil rubbish.

Um, and that should provide a nice reflective surface on the inside. Don't necessarily have to take it all the way down, because really, all I'm looking to do is get like the bounce. You know, I can want it right down the bottom. So because these are very wide angle uh, leads so you know I want them to bounce off here.

But yeah, anyway. just you know, generally bounce around. and yep, that seems to stick in there nicely, just with some uh, glue stick stuff. So yeah, beauty, that's actually uh, really easy and fun and that sticks down nicely.

I mean, this is probably not a permanent you know solution. Um, this looks like it's going to work, so if it does, you know I'll like, probably put a bit more spit and polish into this thing. But anyway, I just want to test what difference the alfoil makes in terms of internal reflections and things like that. Okay, at the moment I'm just going to do the walls.

I'm not going to do the top. That could help as well because it's all bouncing around inside there. so the more reflectory stuff you have, the better. But we'll give that a bowl.

There it is. It does actually look a little bit better, has improved. It's not, as you know, the shadows aren't as harsh. Still not perfect, but not too shabby.

Now of course. the thing with uh this is is that the smaller the board gets like I've got a raspberry pi in there that's not really ultra small board, but the smaller the board gets then, uh, for the same height here, you're going to get more, uh, white space in your frame and that's going to overexpose your image. Well, it's going to under expose your board. Uh, your camera is going to see more light so it's going to like, uh, under expose the board.

So of course you can manually adjust your camera and all that. But at the moment, I'm just doing that constant aperture F10 and just letting it choose everything else. There you go, Look at that. it's not directly on because my microphone cable is in the way.

I'm not directly overhead, but near enough. That's that's really nice, isn't it? Yeah, there's a couple of shadows around the outside of the board, but jeez, that looks pretty spiffy happy with that. Okay, I've added uh, some alfoil on the top there. You can see it just hanging around the edges.

There you go. Check that out. That's probably it's probably the best yet. You can see the uh antenna connector on the top left there.

The shadow on that can is pretty much gone away, so that looks that looks really jazzy Liking that. So there you go. There's my little, uh, do-it-yourself light box. I rather like that.

I know it's a bit how you doing. it's pretty crude. I'll tidy it up a bit, but um, I'm pretty darn happy with that. And as I said, uh, yeah, I might like.

for really small, like tiny boards and stuff like that, it would help if it was lower. And of course, I can, uh, enlarge the hole in the top so that their lens goes through a bit. Um, so that'll uh, that'll help in that respect a little bit. But then I'm thinking oh, maybe like cut up the sides or something.

You know, like I'll figure out the exact length by uh, experimentation. you can even calculate it based on here. you know your lenses and your focal lengths and your sensor size and everything else. Um, but yeah, I like if I cut them up here, then I can like fold it out to make a dust smaller or I can bring them together and then just put some tape around the uh sides to.

well, it'll probably just hold up on its own. Uh, I guess the only thing missing really is like a rig that holds my camera on top. But apart from that, I mean there's like tons of light in there, so it's super fast shutter speed. Anyway, it's like 400th of a second or something at F10 and it's just working great.

so I'm yeah, I'm happy with that. Not bad for just cobbling that together, but you've got to use good quality leads like this. You just get the like one hung low brand off ebay. They're going to be absolute garbage.

The color rendering index is going to be garbage. You've got to get like guaranteed name brand with guaranteed high color rendering index because it's important to get really accurate. uh, coloring. But um, yeah.

like these little strips were perfect. I'd like to hack that together in minutes. It was just easy. And it's cheap.

uh, and simple. and it makes a really nice light box. Yeah, I can get better photos if I manually like adjust the shutter and aperture and everything else. Set up the camera properly and stuff like that and you can even like color, calibrate your camera and you can do it like all sorts of whiz-bang photography stuff.

But yeah, just for shooting nice uh, Pcb or even product, uh, prototypes. I mean the Bm-235 in here was just a bit too uh, big to be photographed in here. So I just lifted it up like a little bit to, uh, take the photo and here's a product. uh, shot of that.

That was just first go, haven't uh, haven't touched it. and there's very little in the way of reflections and things like that. So yeah, I'm pretty happy with that. But of course everyone's got an opinion on this sort of stuff.

And as always, leave your comments down below over on the Ev blog forum. Anyway, if you like that, please give it a big thumbs up. I hope you found it useful. Catch you next time you.