The cameras arrived today - the only parts that are not coming from China. They are, however, made in China. These 5mm "endoscopes" come with a fairly short USB micro A connector and an adapter to convert to standard USB A. This allows them to plug to many phones as well as PCs.

On the windows laptop they both seemed to work but did not have good focus under 40mm (as advertised) with one of them being a bit less good than the other. At 40mm 0603 components are really small - and resolution is only 640x480.

I had read that disposable cameras have usable lenses for this kind of stuff and a quick rummage turned up an unused Fuki Quiksnap with an expiry date of 2009. The battery had leaked inside it but it rendered 3 lenses, to of which - the main lens and the rear viewfinder lens - improved the eyesight of the cameras no-end.

They are now mounted with Sugru moldable glue which will take a day to cure.

They focus great at 28mm at which size 0603 are clearly defined and the biggest component I use - the SOIC-24 PCF8575 - fills the screen in landscape mode. 

The downer is on the interface side. The two  cameras need to be plugged into opposite sides of the laptop to get different usb host. According to https://github.com/openpnp/openpnp/wiki/USB-Camera-Troubleshooting-FAQ and  https://github.com/openpnp/openpnp/wiki/OpenPnpCaptureCamera if you use OpenPnpCaptureCamera and set the camera to use a compressed format like mpeg, you can put two cameras on one host. These cameras only do YUV uncompressed video. This is a minor bummer as I was planning to combine all the USB on a multiport 3.0/2.0 hub and have only one wire to worry about.