Tuesday, April 12, 2011

My Tektronix contest entry

Vote for me here: http://mytektronixscope.com/videos/

I am using my Tektronix 2246 analog oscilloscope to show the image generated by my DIY electron microscope. The 2246 is operating in X-Y mode, with the channels connected to a raster scan generator. The vertical scanning frequency is about 30Hz and the horizontal frequency is about 10KHz. The trace brightness (Z axis) is modulated with the secondary electron signal from the microscope.

2 comments:

  1. Hey Ben how are your efforts on digitalizing the project?

    I have created a laser scanner camera. It used a show laser, a photodiode, some standard A/D converter chip , a 555er and the FTDI USB chip i recommended you(the previous version at least) and does the graphics via the windows GDI api.
    If you are interested, i could check if i have the sourcecode still lying around somewhere. Compilation for non commercial projects is free with the borland c++ compiler.

    I have thought a bit about X and Y deflection generators. It can be done with a simple quarz timer and counter ICs put in series onto the clock output

    you could use two 14 bit D/A s for deflection and thus take photographs with 256 Mega Pixels of the whole object and you could share these with us.
    Would be awesome

    Washers, screws, watches, coins, light bulb filaments, rocks

    how does that sound?
    simon

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  2. Simon, I've been pretty swamped, and I will probably not start on the digitizing circuitry until after Maker Faire. When I do start on it, I will probably buy an FPGA dev kit, since I have really been wanting to investigate those, and I will use the SEM project as my first design to make use of an FPGA's high performance.

    There are a lot of benefits of using an FPGA to control the scan pattern as well as collect the video data, and it has the possibility of operating without being connected to a computer.

    I'll admit my C++ coding skills are pretty much non-existent, so I try to avoid it as much as possible.

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