SEM beam alignment: The Happy Place
Aligning Milly’s electron beam is tricky business. It’s a process involving hours (or even days!) of pain and uncertainty that might, just possibly, result in […]
Experiments in nano manufacturing
There’s Plenty of Room at the Bottom. —Richard Feynman With the recent demise of Milly’s electron emitter, I attempted to make a new one. Much […]
New Year, New Emitter
We can easily forgive a child who is afraid of the dark; the real tragedy of life is when men are afraid of the light. […]
SEM back online
A couple of months ago, Milly started having beam issues. At the time it seemed like emitter trouble. New emitter modules run about $3k, so I […]
Megapixel images from an analog SEM
I recently posted my first batch of photos from Milly. While I am happy with her beam performance, I was dissatisfied with the digital photo […]
Big SEM: online
I recently got Milly the big SEM online. She had a ton off issues that I’ll chronicle in future posts. But rather than dwell on her […]
Tomorrow we bake
Milly is coming along nicely. I believe we’re over the vacuum difficulties. She’s buzzing along at a nice deep vacuum in the SPEC, INT, and GUN […]
Milly’s computer is happy again
After several days of looking, the cause of the trouble proved to be a broken lead on a thermocouple line. On to debugging the vacuum […]
SEM FTW: Meryl lives again
Happy Holidays! Here is a 2mm stainless steel screw. It’s sitting on a standard, non-shrunken quarter for scale. Here it is under Meryl’s beam at […]