Collaborate Disseminate
The Daguerreotype was among the earliest photographic processes, long before glass plates or film, that relied on sensitizing a thin layer of silver on top of a copper plate. The …read more Continue reading Sputtering Daguerreotypes, Batman!
In a time when cameras have been reduced to microchips, it’s ironic that the old view camera, with its bellows and black cloth draped over the viewscreen for focusing, endures as an icon for photography. Such technology appears dated and with no application in the modern world, but as [Ben …read more
Continue reading [Ben Krasnow] Rolls Old School Camera Out for Photolithography
[Justin] enjoys tinkering in his home lab, working on a wide variety of experiments. Recently, he’d found much success in coating objects with thin layers of various metals with the help of a DC sputtering magnetron. However, titanium simply wouldn’t work with this setup. Instead, [Justin] found another way.
As …read more
Continue reading Titanium Coating Is Actually Pretty Straightforward
“You can never be too rich or too thin,” the saying goes, and when it comes to coatings, it’s true that thinner is often better. The way to truly thin coatings, ones that are sometimes only a few atoms thick, is physical vapor deposition, or PVD, a technique where a …read more
Continue reading Vacuum Sputtering with a Homemade Magnetron
[Nixie] wants to sputter. We know, who doesn’t? But [Nixie] has a specific purpose for his sputtering: thin-film deposition, presumably in support of awesome science. But getting to that point requires a set of tools that aren’t exactly off-the-shelf items, so he’s building out a DIY sputtering rig on the cheap.
If you’re not familiar with sputtering, that’s understandable. In this context, sputtering is a process that transfers particles from one solid to another by bombarding the first solid with some sort of energetic particles, usually electrons or a plasma. When properly controlled, sputtering has applications from mass spectrometry to …read more
When you’re a high schooler who built a semiconductor fab in your garage, what’s next on your agenda? Why, adding a scanning electron microscope to your lab, naturally. How silly of you to ask.
When last we stumbled across the goings on in the most interesting garage in New Jersey, [Sam Zeloof] was giving a tour of his DIY semiconductor fabrication lab and showing off some of the devices he’s made there, including diodes and MOSFETs. As impressive as those components are, it’s the equipment he’s accumulated that really takes our breath away. So adding an eBay SEM to the …read more
Continue reading Scanning Electron Microscope Adds to Already Impressive Garage Lab