We have been having some major trouble with our data acquisition. When we run it on a negative bias there seem to be no problems. However when we run a positive bias scan there seems to be no detection. Today we took apart the box and attempted to see if it was the voltage regulator. We determined it was not the voltage regulator due to the fact it is a positive bias voltage regulator (This is what I was told by someone who knows a lot more about electrical components than I do). So, does anyone either have any suggestions or is there a replacement box available?

We printed out some metal oxide films and have been trying to scan them. The Scanstation is working fine. We made a sample with Fe,Co,Cu,Zn and there seems to be very little difference in the output voltages all the way across the slide. One thing I noticed that's seems odd is that the voltages on the txt file are around 11 and vary +/- 0.5 V. This seems awfully high considering that the initial output voltage dropped down to 1.8 before we started the scan.

Here are a few more things I've learned about the 3 gear system in playing around with it. You can easily detach the top gear to replace the two 8 tooth gears (or vice versa), but in order to remove those pieces from the lower gear, you don't want to have to tear apart the entire station. To remove the gear closest to the servo motor, I suggest using a pair of pliers to pull the axle out of the servo motor. When you have pulled the axle far enough, the gear will fall out.

Over the last several weeks I have been working on the possibility of making the scanning process much quicker (and probably should have got more people involved in this side project). I will post a lot more details over the next several days but what I've found is that a pretty decent scan can be taken by cutting down the number of gears in the gear boxes from 4 to 3. I'll post the results I'm getting, and the "quick" way to modify your scan station to be able to scan substrates with this new system. From there I will need help to make this better!!!

I figured out that it was very hard to get this value be about -1V. Does it change anything if I keep this value about -2.5V? (I am scanning using negative bias, the positive bias worked fine).