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Build Your Own Scanning Tunneling Microscope
I don't want to spen writes "For all you fans of nanotech out there, a friend just posted me a link to instructions for building a scanning tunnelling microscope, from the University of Muenster. Interestingly, their licensing terms sound open source-ish to me: '(... We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes. On these web pages all necessary diagrams, drawings, material descriptions and software-source-codes are published for free access. While granting the right to build the microscope we make it mandatory that new developments, improvements or other applications of our design are also made openly available for private or educational purposes...)'"
...how can they actually stop someone from building this telescope in a way that violates the licence?
Slashdot: when news breaks, we give you the pieces.
come on! At least write it in java....
:-D
Seriously though, looks like a great summer project.. Not to mention my college will now have a SEM because of these plans
I work in a plant growth research lab, and we built one of these to get real time images of protoplasts (plant cells in culture). It was cheap, and produces what I found to be suprisingly excellent-quality images. Of course, we also got a hundred thousand dollar Bausch & Lomb scope to do more "complicated" work...
Okay the instructions are in English - nice. The diagrams are in German? Need a little help here...
^^
seriously, the open sourcish license is interesting. It would work very well in an academic setting, which is analogous to actual OSS: people creating "products" with their primary goal not being money, and the GPLish license prevents it from being incorporated into proprietary, commercial products.
I don't know if you can do anything meaningful in your mom's basement with the STM kit, but interesting nonetheless.
VIVA1023.com | Political Fashion.
>> from the article:
:\
The software was written in Visual Basic 6 for Windows
Great! But I wanted to control the STM from my linux box
It already controls my lights, coffie maker, telephone, network, CD player...
NeoThermic
Use my link above, or to view my server, NeoThermic.com
A hardware desging, in the GPL style, released to man for his education and enlightenment?
/faints/
You mean this is not like, say for a example, some greedy physician who comes up with a slightly different way of suturing someone with existing tools, patenting said technique, and then demanding worldwide royalties????
The end is near!
--
My httrack beat your /. effect!!
I win!!
...I'm still reeling from that space telescope story from some time ago.
Legend had it, back when I was in school, a gradstudent bought one at a university auction for $250 bucks and set it up in his living room.
Well, I still have this covered, but not many of my friends do.
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
My question may seem weird due to my ignorance. Is it possible to use such a microscope to find the structure of say.. the HIV virus and its chemical composition? Secondly, how are such small structures located/found due to the huge spatial distances involved?
Banu
Can a tunneling microscope see prions?
"The world is a construct of forceful imagination. Those who don't know walk around in the reailties of those who do"
Apologies, I'll do a search next time i submit a story.
Don't go to a brothel if you want to buy broth
Interestingly, their licensing terms sound open source-ish to me: '(
:'("
heh, did anyone else quickly glance at that and think he was making a sad crying face because it sounded open source?
"Uh oh! It sounds like open source!
To put limits on use you need a patent or a contract, so in this case that means a contract ... which means they need a click through license, which they dont have.
Just publishing a seperate license without requiring agreement before downloading is unlikely to stand up.
I dont think so
;-)
With BSD or GPL style licenses you are actually allowed to use the copyrighted work in an commercial setting, just not to sell it. For instance a commercial company might run their web server using GPL licensed software.
With this not only do they retain the exclusive commercial rights, but the license might in fact be read as an attempt to force you to turn over any improvements on their design.
So if you make an improvement, does this mean that you have implicitely granted the University of Muenster the rights for commercial exploitation of your own improvment by accepting their license in the first place?
This does not sound "open source-ish" to me, it sounds like out right theft.
PS: Please ignore any bad spellings/grammar in my english or at least be polite when telling me
http://science.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=02/04/1 6/1736212&mode=thread&tid=134
You're full of shit. Ya can't use an STM with organic samples, let alone live organic samples, let along live organic samples in real time. I know most Slashdot residents are morons but try not to insult the intelligence of those of us who have one.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Your comment makes little sense. My lab does a lot of microscopy. B & L strictly make optical microscopes, which by the wavelengths of light, and properties of glass are restricted to resolve objects down to about 100 nanometers or so (at best - and we're talking with a really really good confocal or deconvolution microscope that runs about $500K). Mediocre electron microscopes visualize objects down to about 1000 angstroms. That's two orders of magnitude better, perhaps more if you have a good EM setup.
How much would it cost to build this?
Does anyone make a low cost version that is already built?
I think a similar thing was done with robots that carried out part of the human genenome project. Sorry I forget the group that put the plans out on web. Any how, there is certianly a demand for scientific instruments that can be assembled for relatively low cost. A good thing for universities in developing countries, that can't afford the cost of brand new equipment. I saw a pH meter made of the carbon rods from D size cells made in India. A lot of labs in developing countries either buy second hand equipment, but just like every thing else there is planned obsolesence, and parts get hard to find or make.
Commercial use is not allowed. HOWEVER, if you google for scanning tunnelling electron microscope construction, you will find several designs which really are open and might even work.
NOT!
And yet they don't actually offer fully assembled devices. Way to go, prohibit people from making a buck off your design just to make yourself feel better and remove the possibility of someone who wants one of these puppys from getting one unless they're willing to build it themselves from scratch.
We grant everybody the right to construct the microscope using the here-published design for private or educational purposes
So I can't even get the geeky neighbourhood kid to build it for me for $40 because that would be "commercial purposes". Plan. If I want 200 of them I can't take the design to a local manufacturer and pay them to do the tooling. Great.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Sorry... I gotta call bullsh!t on this one. Electron microscopy can not give you "real-time" images. The cells have to be fixed thus dead thus not real time.
Shows a mounted sample on the stage
Likewise, I do not believe that Bausch & Lomb makes EM equipment either.
Now, I may be wrong... if so, no offense taken, but this just seems incorrect to me.
Ac
I mean this is cool, bet really the cost on older electron microscopes is pretty low (under 2k) Heck theres a phillips 500 for sale on Ebay for $1000 right now. I've often thought about buying one, but dont have 3 phase in the house and the garage is a little damp.
Yes, his post is completely wrong. However, there have been advances in STM so that you can do STM with fixed organic samples now. Here's an example of a recent published study. Also atomic force microscopy (AFM) has become fairly common with fixed organic samples. I'm not calling you wrong - I'm just updating Slashdot readers to the state of the art in biological microscopy.
/. should post dupes in a separate category! :)
Any technology distinguishable from magic, is insufficiently advanced.
Thanks. In this study they're not "doing" STM in the sense that they're scanning the structure of an organic sample, they're just using an STM observe the effect of presenting a biological sample to a gold buffer.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Despite what they call it in English (University of Muenster), the proper name is the Westfaelische Wilhelms Universitaet. Even though I am an American, I studied there for a semester.
/., it isn't a surprise to see good things from Muenster. It is one of those wonderful little secrets - a top notch place few know about.
;)
Muenster is a wonderful college town, as well as a place of historical significance (30 years war ended there). The hospital associated with the university, and thus the medical program, are well respected across Europe. (Comparible to Mayo / Johns Hopkins / Mass. General here in the US).
Anyway, while it is surprising to see this on the front of
Posting AC because I believe in privacy on the net
I've seen some crazy moderation, but moderating 'Das blinkenlichten' as flamebait is amusing. I guess I better take down the poster in my machine room. I didn't realize that it might piss someone off.
Note to moderators: read the Jargon File or get a clue before moderating.
OSI talks a lot about including open software in the commercial world.
Closing free software to commercial entities is an idea roundly rejected by modern free software thinkers.
There is a similar reasonably well-documented homebrew STM that was built by a guy named Jurgen Muller. His site is pretty interesting, and well worth the read.
Obviously there are a lot of articles on STMs in various academic journals. If you're at a university, you might start by searching in Reviews of Scientific Instruments and perhaps the Phys Rev journals.
I was involved with a STM project for a while, and our conclusion was that the 3D piezo setup is quite fragile, and extremely difficult to isolate from vibration, etc. It seemed that a better design was a so-called slip-stick walker, which uses a stage that slides on smooth rails. A tube of piezoelectric ceramic is attached and driven in such a way that it creates a series of small, sharp forces on the stage that momentarily break the static friction between the stage and base, causing it to move in small steps.
This stage is used to approach the sample to the STM tip, which is mounted on another piezo tube, and can be deflected laterally and vertically in order to do a raster scan of a small area of the surface.
The limitation to this method is that you can't scan a very large surface area. You can add a second "walker" unit underneath the first one so that you can move the sample from side to side in addition to moving it towards/away from the tip, so this would allow you to scan a stripe across the surface.
To get full 3D control, there are several designs called "beetles" (IIRC) that are described in the literature, which use a somewhat similar technique that allows more control.
Bullshit to you. You can use STM for live images. It is a bit of a new technique, but it has been done.
"Redundant"? This story is redundant.; pointing out that it's a dupe is not redundant.
If all this should have a reason, we would be the last to know.
We assure you, however, that hanging the scope from a thin scaffolding using light springs, and then attaching the entire setup to a huge piece of granite will not be sufficient.
On a more serious note, an STM is really easy to build, but really hard to make work. There has been more than one physics graduate student that has entered perpetual grad school limbo trying to get one of these to work. The vibration damping is just the start. Learning to etch the tungsten probes so that you get the necessary few atoms at the end is quite an ordeal. And then attaching the probe without allowing the tip to even come close to any surface. And then calibrating the piezoelectric so that the tip will be very very very close to the sample, but never touch it. You will go through 100 hand etched probes before the instrument is even grossly calibrated.
And then measuring the gap current. You learn what kind of noise a power supply really has. Getting a noise low enough so that a signal is discernible after amplification requires a power supply the likes of which few has seen. And then the noise that introduced by the amplification process. This are not your ordinary op amps. I shudder to even think about building a board that quiet.
But have fun, and remember us for you optical table needs. We are, after all, the only one who sell the genuine and otherwise real and purchasable Vibration Proof Table(TM)(patent pending).
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
should have landed a few minutes ago - cant find any news.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Forget STM, I just want a microscope to play with.
I have a QX3+ toy microscope. You plug it in to USB. I have heard that Linux can talk to it like any other USB camera (this one just happens to be built into a microscope) so I'm going to give that a go.
But what I really want is a microscope like the ones I used in biology classes, not a plastic toy. I want little knobs that move the stage around, rather than pushing the slide with my fingers. And I want a really high resolution camera.
eBay is probably a good place to find an affordable microscope; it could be used and I wouldn't care. But I have no idea how to tell which one is a good deal (I'm a computer geek, not a microscope geek). Any advice on what brand or model of microscope? And any advice on what sort of camera mount I could get?
Instead of a USB web cam, I'm thinking I should use a nice digital camera, such as a Nikon Coolpix 990. But I'm worried it would be top-heavy and would tip over easily. So pointers to a lightweight camera that can be attached to a microscope would also be welcome.
steveha
lf(1): it's like ls(1) but sorts filenames by extension, tersely
where's SCO when you need them?
If nothing else, it might be cool to build one just to look at stuff, and I finally have a use for that ISA slot.
-cp-
President Bush to Liberate Alaska!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
http://news.google.com/news?num=30&hl=en&edition=u s&q=cluster:news%2emysanantonio%2ecom%2fstory%2ecf m%3fxla%3dsaen%26xlb%3d180%26xlc%3d1107306
you will have to go through few of these to get to details.
Consensus is good, but informed dictatorship is better
Technically, if you buy all the parts, hand them to your local geek, and pay him cash to assemble it for you, then he's not "selling a fully assembled device".
He's renting you the skills and time to assemble it.
Same as if you bought a kit RC helicopter, and then paid the geek to build it.
You didn't buy the kit from him
You didn't buy an assembled product from him
You merely contracted his labor to assemble the device.
I don't know why you'd need 200 of these for personal use, and if you're an educational institution who wants the devices fully assembled, I'm dead-set certain they'd be interested in hearing from you directly.
Visit CryptoGnome in his home.
For a horrible, horrible moment, I read the headline as "Build Your Own Spamming Tunneling Microscope."
Just think what horrid new forms of viral marketing a research tool like that could help develop.
If we use the FSF's mode of describing things as a point of reference, this is probably an open source project, but not a free one. If it were a software project, it would violate the very first of the freedoms the FSF considers essential (look here) in that it restricts who may use it for what purposes. Whether or not they can meaningfully impose that restriction is a separate issue.
I'd be surprised if anyone can turn their design into a scanning tunneling telescope... Now that would really be something to reach out and touch someone!
Hey, you. The moderators who modded this "Flamebait". Please post anonymously and explain what the heck is flamebait here. "Offtopic" I could see, since this isn't about an STM, just an M. (Although it is about "Build Your Own" so its not THAT offtopic.)
Come on, think about GPL requirements for using and redistributing GPL'd code, then remember that these guys are offering the design and software for a device, then compare. They release the design and software (and any device based on the design) for public or private use (I wish I could be certain about the translation of the German - there's an odd passage about a view of the circuit board "with eagle"). If you improve the system, they want you to return the original favour. I don't think that proposal comes close to any form of theft, let alone "outright theft," and it does compare with the GPL more or less.
------ The only greater hazard to your liberty than n politicians is n+1 politicians.
if you don't know what a question is about, don't mod. Here's a serious and interesting question and it's modded like it were a joke.
Note that this article is about scanning tunneling microscopy, not electron microscopy.
Don't drop the soap, Tommy!
Like it says on the tin, building a scanning tunneling microscope was a 1st year undergraduate physics project at Imperial College of Science and Technology back in 1987 when I was there(http://www.imperial.ac.uk/)
In my universe, 1000 Angstrom is the same as 100 nanometers so that makes your statement zero orders of magnitude. My experience with a SEM that's cheaper than the $500k B&L is that you can get well below 100 nanometer.
www.DigiKey.com has a great number of A/D chips, many under $5. If you can handle a soldering iron and can read the spec sheet, you should definitely consider it.
'Fixed' organic samples meaning what? Coated in gold? Not likely they'd be alive then! If I'm correct, the problem with organic samples and STM is that the electron 'beam' used to illuminate the sample would fry the sample to pieces, hence the need for a coating. And as far as AFM goes, try building one of those on your own for an affordable price! Doesn't sound like you have much of a handle on the state of the art yourself, sorry. At any rate, most biological related microscopy can be done with light optics.
I just want a DIY electron microscope, anybody.
You're mixing up SEM again, and as has been mentioned your units.
STM, can do much more. Remember molecule man? Spelling out things like IBM in atoms? THAT's STM.
My experience, such as it is with electron microscopes, is that they are pretty much point and click. Very forgiving insturments (not so much TEM, but I'm sure there are some of those that are quite forgiving too.) Optical microscopes are certainly a little more involved than putting a sample in front of the objective.
Echt jovel!
3000+ comments meta-modded. 0 mod points awarded.
Lesson for other meta-suckers: Don't believe the hype!
Somebody shows us how to build a home STM, and all the questions and comments are about GPL licencing! Hey kids, this is a very cool project. It lets us look at really small stuff!
Why would I want to? The same reason I have one of those desktop gyroscope toys and a slinky. Its neat.
Just where am I to solder this chip? Yes the A/D chips are cheap, but its all the other stuff that lets the chip interface with the computer that buggers it all up. There are things like buffers, registers, and timers that go on an A/D card. Hell A/D cards have their own BIOS so they can start up correctly and understand the instructions coming from the A/D card driver. It is obvious that you have not ever worked with A/D technology. But if you want to solder a A/D chip into your computer...have at it...let me know how it ends up.
An STM doesn't use an electron beam. An STM uses quantum tunneling of electrons from the surface you're looking at to the tip to measure how far away the surface is from the tip. By this method the texture of the surface can be mapped out. There are quite a few posts that seem to be mixing up an electron microscope with a Scanning Tunneling microscope.