Hackaday Links: June 15, 2014

June 15, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 13 Comments

Love the classic brick Game Boy, but hate the low-contrast LCD, terrible battery life, and the inability to play Pokemon Emerald? This one’s just for you. It’s the ultimate DMG Game Boy – a Game Boy Advance SP stuffed (is it stuffed if it’s taking up more room?) into the classic Game Boy enclosure. Forum thread.

Zooming in to a microchip. It starts off with a DSLR and ends up on a scanning electron microscope. This is an older chip, and the CPU you’re using right now probably has much smaller features.

Every movie and every TV show set in space invariably has space helmets with LEDs pointing towards the face. Think how annoying that would be for an astronaut. Here’s how you add LEDs to a space helmet for a nice theatrical effect. Just don’t use it on a real EVA.

Everyone’s favorite crowdfunded space probe can apparently be detected with an 8-foot dish. That’s the same size as an old C-band dish, a.k.a West Virginia wildflowers. We know some of you have one of these out there, so go make a ~2GHz feed horn, grab a USB TV dongle, write it up, and send it in.

Alright, MAME cabinets. Say you want to go old-school and have a CRT. Some arcade games use a vertically oriented display, while other, slightly more modern games use a horizontally mounted display. How do you fix this? Get a big bearing, of course. This one allows a 19″ CRT to be rotated 90 degrees – all you need, really, if you’re switching between Pacman and Mortal Kombat.

Hey mechanical keyboard enthusiasts! Here’s some Hackaday Cherry MX keycaps. Informal interest check in the comments below. Suggestions welcome.

Electron Beam Control In A Scanning Electron Microscope

April 13, 2014 by Brian Benchoff 6 Comments

Electron

A few years ago [Ben Krasnow] built a scanning electron microscope from a few parts he had sitting around. He’s done a few overviews of how he built his SEM, but now he’s put up a great video on how to control electrons, focus them into a point, and scan a sample.

The basic idea behind a scanning electron microscope is to shoot electrons down a tube, focus them into a point, and scan a conductive sample and detect the secondary electrons shot off the sample and display them on an oscilloscope. [Ben] is generating electrons with a small tungsten filament at the top of his electron ‘stack’. Being like charged, these electrons naturally fan out, so a good bit of electron optics are required to get a small point.

Focusing is done through a series of pinholes and electrostatic deflectors, much like you’d see in an old oscilloscope CRT. In the video, you can see [Ben] shooting electrons and displaying a Christmas tree graphic onto a piece of phosphor-coated glass. He has a pretty big scanning area in his SEM, more than enough to look at a few chips, wafers, and whatever other crazy stuff is coming out of [Ben]’s lab.

Video below, along with the three-year-old overview of the entire microscope.

Continue reading “Electron Beam Control In A Scanning Electron Microscope” →

10 µm Scanning Electron Microscope From Vidicon Tube

February 6, 2011 by Mike Szczys 13 Comments

[Segelfam] built his own scanning electron microscope. He based the machine around an old Vidicon tube, a video recording technology that was used in NASA’s unmanned space probes prior the Galileo probe in the late 1970’s. We struggle a bit with the machine translation of [Segelfam’s] original build log, but it seems that he filled the tube with helium in order to convert it for use as a microscope. But don’t worry, if you’re interested in this hack the information is all there – between the forum thread and build log – it’s just a matter of putting it all together to fill in the details.

In case you were wondering, the image to the upper right has been colored using Photoshop; the rest are straight from the SEM.

[Thanks Jerry]