Upgrading Your Foldable Magnifier With a Multi-level Brightness LED-light

A magnifier is a very handy tool when working with electronics. But often, when the light in the room isn't bright enough, it is still hard to see the tiny codes written on top of IC's and SMD parts. So I decided to add a light to my foldable magnifier.

I had some hyperflux LEDs lying around that allowed me to get high and low brightness out of one led with still plenty of light in both modes. A switch was added to choose the level of brightness.

• A foldable magnifier (mine only cost € 2.50)
• A hyperflux LED with 3 'LEDs' in it.
• 3 x 150Ohm resistor
• A powerconnector
• A single pole, double throw tumbler switch
• A bit of protoboard

Assembling the electronics is fairly easy. Just solder a resistor to all + pins of the LED. Then solder 2 LEDs to one side, one LED to the other and +9V to the middle of the switch. Connect the - pin of the LED to ground and you are done.

I did solder my switch to the copper side of the board under a slight angle. This allowed me to use the switch as the mounting point for the led and the angle directed the light to the middle of the magnifier.

To mount the LED, I drilled 2 holes into the magnfier: one for the switch (holding the LED) and a larger one for the powerconnector. Everything was fitted and screwed into place and trimmed so that the magnifier could fold in and out easily.