Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics

dberard.com

75 points·MichaelAO··9 comments

Knowing nothing about Electron Microscopes, I found the design of the motion mechanism very clever: http://web.archive.org/web/20130927064954/http://www.geociti...

http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/scan-head/

Also of interest is that the inventor, John Alexander, submitted a patent application (US5866902), then withdrew the application. Perhaps this was done to establish prior art in the USPTO's database, and prevent someone else from patenting it?

This is super cool. Bookmarked. It would be awesome to see it working. I wonder if there is a video on this.

This project uses PI control in the feedback loop. I am curious if the author also tried PID control, that would have been faster with correct tuning.

Wow. Stuff like this makes me want to get off my ass and do something cool. Really reinvigorates my passion for hands-on science and engineering, as opposed to the maths and code that I usually look at.

On a related note, Ben Krasnow built a SEM in his garage. Search YouTube for his channel.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjYVF4a6iU

Ben Karsnow's channel is really inspiring. With every video, he pushes the limits of what I thought it was possible to do in your garage.

I'm looking forward to something like this rescuing a few harddrive platters.

Nice to know they're not magic after all :) Very inspiring.

Nice project. Had no idea the electronics were so simple.

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