Using the DigiMicro Scale with Mac OS X

The DigiMicro Scale is sold by dnt and is also known as "Veho VMS-001 USB Microscope" and ''Venus USB2.0 Camera", apparently made by Vimicro Corporation

While this is a nice USB microscopic camera with a decent resolution, zoom and bright working light, the software for OS X that comes with it has a few problems.

The worst part of the software, for many, is that it simply does not appear to record any pictures and videos to disk.

After finding this review, reading the comments led me to the solution to work around this bug.

The reason is that the app is trying to create the files in root of your startup disk. And for many users, this place is protected against modifications by default.

There are two solutions to work around this problem:

Solution 1: Make sure your root folder is writable

To make the root folder of your startup disk writable, do a "Get Info" on the startup disk, find the "Sharing & Permissions" panel, unlock the lock there, and change either "admin" or "everyone" to "Read & Write". You may have to redo that after each restart of Mac OS X.

Solution 2: Change the folder where the app wants to create the files

The app is actually not writing explicitly to the root folder of the startup disk but to the "current folder" which is set when the app gets launched - and this is always set to the root folder when double clicking the app.

Here are two solutions to choose a different folder:

The manual way

1. Open Terminal.app and use the cd command to move to a folder of your choice. Or skip this to choose your home folder.
2. Assuming the MicroCapture app is placed in your Applications folder, enter the following text: /Applications/MicroCapture.app/Contents/MacOS/MicroCapture

This will launch the app and now pictures will appear in the folder you had cd'd to.

The automatic way

To make things a lot easier, I wrote a little shell script which causes the files created in a folder called MicroCapture which is inside your home folder's Documents folder. To set this up, do the following steps, once:

1. Get the shell script here (if it's a .zip file, double click it to get to the actual folder, which should be called "MicroCapture app fix"
2. Locate your MicroCapture app, right-click (ctrl-click) on it and choose Show Package Contents
3. Open the folder Contents, then the folder MacOS
4. There should be a file named MicroCapture. Rename that to MicroCaptureCode
5. Now place the downloaded file MicroCapture into this folder so that you end up with two files, one name MicroCapture with about 4 KB in size, and one larger MicroCaptureCode (about 164 KB).
6. That's it. Now close the folder and launch the MicroCapture app. Take a test picture. Look into the MicroCapture inside your home folder's Documents folder. The file should appear there.