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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by fpordeig on Sunday June 21, 2015 @04:45AM (#9752712)
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/

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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by femto on Sunday June 21, 2015 @06:10AM (#9752843)
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?
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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by aaggarwal on Sunday June 21, 2015 @04:07PM (#9754795)
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.

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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by irremediable on Sunday June 21, 2015 @02:01PM (#9754316)
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.
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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by tsomctl on Sunday June 21, 2015 @03:09AM (#9752518)
On a related note, Ben Krasnow built a SEM in his garage. Search YouTube for his channel.
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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by fpordeig on Sunday June 21, 2015 @04:36AM (#9752696)
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.

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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by cxseven on Sunday June 21, 2015 @05:00AM (#9752728)
I'm looking forward to something like this rescuing a few harddrive platters.
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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by Osmium on Sunday June 21, 2015 @06:28AM (#9752875)
Nice to know they're not magic after all :) Very inspiring.
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Re:Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics by aswanson on Sunday June 21, 2015 @07:12AM (#9752955)
Nice project. Had no idea the electronics were so simple.
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