Microscope Camera

Make old HDCE-10A USB microscope cameras work on 64-bit Windows 10 and 11.

Many labs still have the HDCE-10A digital microscope camera (sold with "ScopePhoto" / "EDn-2" software; USB ID 1578:800C, "Huaqi Digital"). Its original driver is 32-bit only, so on any 64-bit Windows the camera shows up as an unknown device and can't be used. This project replaces the vendor software with a free, open-source driver package and viewer app.

Download and install

1. Download MicroscopeCamera-Setup-x.y.z.exe from the latest release.
2. Run it and accept the administrator prompt. It installs the app and the USB driver.
   • If Windows shows "Windows protected your PC", click More info → Run anyway. The installer isn't commercially code-signed.
3. Plug in the camera and start Microscope Camera from the Desktop or Start menu.

No Python, Zadig or vendor CD needed. Uninstall from Settings → Apps; that removes the driver too.

Features

• Live colour video at 1280 × 1024, 15 fps (8 fps "Safe" mode for slow USB ports or hubs)
• Automatic exposure, or manual exposure time and gain
• One-click white balance; manual red and blue
• Snapshots as PNG, TIFF or JPG, and MP4 video recording
• Zoom with the mouse wheel, drag to pan, crosshair overlay, mirror and flip
• Keyboard: Space snapshot · R record · W white balance · F11 full screen
• Reconnects by itself if the camera is unplugged

Supported hardware

Camera	HDCE-10A and other cameras with the same internals
USB ID	VID_1578 & PID_800C
Bridge chip	eMPIA EM2750 (chip ID 0x21)
Sensor	Micron/Aptina MT9M001, 1.3 MP colour (I2C 0x5D, ID 0x8431)
Windows	10 and 11, 64-bit (x64)

Cameras with a different USB ID but the same EM2750 + MT9M001 internals will probably work after adding their ID to driver/microscope_camera.inf and camera.py. Pull requests are welcome.

How it works

The vendor's kernel driver can't load on 64-bit Windows, so this project doesn't use it:

• Driver: the camera is bound to the generic, signed libusb-win32 kernel driver. Windows only installs driver packages with a signed catalog, so the build signs the package catalog with a fresh self-signed certificate and deletes its private key immediately (the same approach as Zadig/libwdi). The installer trusts that certificate machine-wide; nobody can sign anything else with it.
• User-space driver (camera.py, em28xx.py, lusb0.py): it configures the EM2750 bridge and the MT9M001 sensor over USB control transfers and I2C, then rebuilds raw RGGB Bayer frames from the isochronous video stream.
• App (microscope_viewer.py): a PySide6 viewer with demosaicing, auto exposure, white balance and capture.

docs/PROTOCOL.md records the hardware details found while reverse-engineering the camera. Several of them aren't documented anywhere else.

Running from source

Requires Python 3.10+ on 64-bit Windows, with the camera already bound to libusb-win32 (install the release once, or use Zadig → libusb-win32).

pip install -r requirements.txt
python microscope_viewer.py

Diagnostics: python probe.py (USB descriptors, bridge registers) and python i2cscan.py (sensor and EEPROM).

Building the installer

Needs Inno Setup 6 and a build venv:

python -m venv %LOCALAPPDATA%\mcb
%LOCALAPPDATA%\mcb\Scripts\pip install -r requirements-build.txt
powershell -ExecutionPolicy Bypass -File packaging\build.ps1

The output is packaging\output\MicroscopeCamera-Setup-<version>.exe. The version comes from VERSION in microscope_viewer.py. Each build signs the driver with a new certificate.

Credits

• Bridge and sensor initialisation follow the Linux kernel em28xx driver.
• libusb-win32 provides the kernel driver.
• Built with PySide6 (Qt), OpenCV, NumPy, PyInstaller and Inno Setup. See THIRD-PARTY.txt.

License

GPL-3.0-or-later. The bundled libusb-win32 driver is GPL-3.0 and its library is LGPL-3.0.

Not affiliated with the camera's manufacturer. Use at your own risk.