
Home Built Scanning Tunneling Microscope Electronics - MichaelAO
http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/electronics/
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fpordeig
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://web.archive.org/web/20130927064954/http://www.geocities.com/spm_stm/Disk_Scanner_Exp.html)

[http://dberard.com/home-built-stm/scan-head/](http://dberard.com/home-built-
stm/scan-head/)

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

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fpordeig
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VdjYVF4a6iU](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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cxseven
I'm looking forward to something like this rescuing a few harddrive platters.

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

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

