An AFM ‘sees’ objects in the same way a blind person does, by feeling the surface using a long flexible stick; lumps and bumps on the surface cause the stick to bend up and down, allowing you to build a picture of it. An AFM is basically a scaled down record player which can read any surface, not just records, generating pictures instead of music. This idea may sound a bit confusing, but it simply sums up the basic function of an AFM.
In an AFM there are a few key parts; a cantilever, a laser with its optics system, a stage, a box of electronics and some vibration control. By taking these components and putting them together we can make a state-of-the-art microscope."
[...]
"One situation where we might consider using an AFM is when we want to see features smaller than 1um. In a really good AFM you can see surface atoms – yeah individual atoms –which are under a nanometre (over 1000 times smaller than 1um!). Not all AFMs can do this, but they can still get some big resolution improvements over an optical microscope."
>"LEGO2NANO is an international student project making real science accessible to young people, by developing low cost scientific equipment for schools and beyond.
Over the last three years of the summer school in Beijing, international and interdisciplinary teams of university students have developed their Open AFM—an open-source atomic force microscope assembled from cheap, off-the-shelf electronic components, Arduino, Lego and 3D printable /laser cut parts."
A similar microscopy technique exists, where the tip does not make contact with the surface, but is instead kept within a nanometer from the surface. At that scale, due to effect I can't claim to understand (quantum tunneling) small amounts of current (~pA-nA) is flowing between the tip and surface. This makes it possible to image the surface at atomic scale by controlling the height of the tip while the tunneling current is kept constant: result is a depth map of atomic structure.
Wouldn't surprise me if this doesn't exist anymore beacause it had "LEGO" in its name.
LEGO likely employs more lawyers than product people at this point, and they're really anal about defending their trademark, because that's pretty much all they have left.
> ... they're really anal about defending their trademark, because that's pretty much all they have left.
A quick search turns up reporting Lego as a close second for highest revenue of a toy company worldwide.
> Namco Bandai was the industry leader with the highest revenue at over 6.6 billion U.S. dollars ... Danish company Lego, known for its interlocking plastic bricks, closely followed Namco Bandai with over 5.78 billion U.S. dollars in revenue.
An AFM ‘sees’ objects in the same way a blind person does, by feeling the surface using a long flexible stick; lumps and bumps on the surface cause the stick to bend up and down, allowing you to build a picture of it. An AFM is basically a scaled down record player which can read any surface, not just records, generating pictures instead of music. This idea may sound a bit confusing, but it simply sums up the basic function of an AFM.
In an AFM there are a few key parts; a cantilever, a laser with its optics system, a stage, a box of electronics and some vibration control. By taking these components and putting them together we can make a state-of-the-art microscope."
[...]
"One situation where we might consider using an AFM is when we want to see features smaller than 1um. In a really good AFM you can see surface atoms – yeah individual atoms –which are under a nanometre (over 1000 times smaller than 1um!). Not all AFMs can do this, but they can still get some big resolution improvements over an optical microscope."
Also:
"What's the big idea?":
https://web.archive.org/web/20150826220219/http://openafm.co...
https://web.archive.org/web/20150826192716/https://openafm.c...
>"LEGO2NANO is an international student project making real science accessible to young people, by developing low cost scientific equipment for schools and beyond.
Over the last three years of the summer school in Beijing, international and interdisciplinary teams of university students have developed their Open AFM—an open-source atomic force microscope assembled from cheap, off-the-shelf electronic components, Arduino, Lego and 3D printable /laser cut parts."
https://www.instituteofmaking.org.uk/research/lego2nano