Didn't watch the video yet and i wana say that two days ago i was thinking that u would have huge potential if u started making videos not just reels and shorts , u got so much to share James , love your work since day one , keep it clean
This is amazing work! Last year i began operating a SEM here in Brazil and i always wondered how hard would it be to build one from scratch. Now I’m rooting for you and excitedly waiting for your next update, keep it up!
Bro I knew you were a nerd from your shorts but you’re great at explaining things directly and clearly but without stumbling. This was a pleasure to watch from the content to the pacing. Hope to see more!
Awesome, Brother! I was a 6492, Aviation Calibration Tech, in the Marines from 1999-2007. Continued as a Metrologist for Lockheed at Stennis Space Center from 2004-2007, and a Turbofan Test Engineer for Lockheed and Rolls-Royce at Stennis from 2007-2012. Became a Control System Engineer from 2012-2018. So, needless to say, I love this shit! Semper Fidelis! USMC 1999-2007
Can't wait to see this ran up. I can see why your exited this is a lot of work. I've used a lot of SEM stuff over the years and still get excited to see the DIY stuff. keep it up ....cheers.
we need more brilliant engineers and designers like you for the United States semiconductor electronics industry, please continue to inspire the next generation of engineers
What a fantastic challange! I worked many years with one eletron microscope and it is amazing how to see an alternative microscopic world! Congratulations for your idea and for having courage to do such a complex project! Greetings from Porto, Portugal 🩵
Man this might be the most ambitious project I've ever heard of, it just looks amazing. I wonder what knowledge is needed to make this and how u learnt it, it seems really complicated but amazing
You should put together a cost and diy writeup. This would help to make scanning microscopes more accessible to average people who are interested in STEM.
Real life Tony stark lmaoo this is super cool, im a sparky and Ive been collecting industrial automation parts for years that people toss in the scrap bin instead of servicing them. Not sure what im gonna make but my garage is full of cool parts like this. Got motors, valves, pneumatic and hydraulic stuff, tons of electronics, plc controllers, cables ect. I honestly like just dialing in my garage setup and slowly fixing the stuff.
Wow ! That machine looks sick, I wan't to see it running keep posting updates ! Ben became very famous after making that microscope, got hired at valve, lots of good things apparently, nothing can stop a man with a purpose,
I'm sat here looking proudly at my ages 8+ Lego car that I made and this guy is off building an electron microscope! Very interesting stuff can't wait to see it finished
I was wondering who you were that I've already subbed to you but you only have one video and then you showed that neat circuit board and I was like oooohhh
Very excited to watch your progress on this! I remember seeing the Applied Science videos back in the day and dreaming of setting up my own. Do you think you'd release schematics of your build once you've got it up and running? Really nice work on the circuit boards
Not to discourage you (as this is a truly formidable undertaking, and I envy your optimism) but the most critical part of a SEM is its objective lens. Unless one is willing to spend a few years of one’s life and get a PhD on this subject, it is rather unlikely that a crude DIY magnetic lens will produce anything even remotely approaching, say, a (sub-) 50nm spot to make the SEM effort worthwhile. Still, I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this project, and if anything it does make for an awesome YT video!
I'm a junior chemical lab technician, and this... "[This one is the goat]!" I'm overly ambitious, so I really got the "I saw some wild shit I didn't think was possible, so I wanted to do it myself!". I didn't think, in my wildest dreams, that building an SEM from scratch would be possible..., but maybe we all tend to forget nothing really is? You don't happen to have an NMR planned next, do you? ;p
Man this is so sick, you're inspiring me to want to try building one but I have a list of plasma related things i want to build first to test temporal/frequency pressure differential gradients. Is that $500 cable going to be a big deal? If you can find me a link, I may be able to contribute on that. No promises, but, i want to see you finish this project, sir. It's f.....cool.
Just start doing projects lol, think of small start you can design or make that involve electronics, then try to make it, research what’s needed, study new topics, most of what he learnt he was just research on electron microscopes,
Crazy for all the electronics to be on perfboard, would be easier to just make your own PCBs for cheap and easier to troubleshoot if you have any problems
White 'phosphor' in filament type lamp is not a phosphor but a simple coating to make difused light effect. Electrons emitted just by thermionic emission have much lower energy (order of 0.1eV, maximum electron energy can be derived from maximum electron energy at the filament temperature minus work function for filament material) than needed to excite phosphor. Fluorescent lamps use phosphor, but again it is not excited by electrons but by ultraviolet radiation emitted from filling gas at low pressure. They offten use argon and a trace amount of mercury vapour. When excited (by electrons of much higher energy, since continous discharge for fluorescent lamp happens at around 90V) mercury atoms emitt smal amout of visible light and very intense UV line at 253.7nm. This UV line excites the white coating phosphor that emitts few broad bands of visible light. When combined those bands 'look' like 'white' light. Also, E-T detector is very delicate. It is fine detector when you are sure that the rest of your system works as intended. With the only sure benefit - the PMT being 'outside'. For testing purposes with enough beam current you can get away with simple faraday cup. Also, my professor of instrumentation electronics at college made scanning EM (as a grad student) back in 96', as i remember (maybe I'm wrong) he used photomultiplier (with faraday cage and acellerator electrode as in ET detector) directly. And I mean directly as in 'without the glass casing' (and scintillator). Simply, secondary electrons were attracted to faraday cage, accellerated, and focused to first PMT dynode. Ofc, microscope has to be at very very high vacuum. He used oil difussion pump, backed by turbomolecular backed by rotary pump. Great work for the microscope, I follow You on Instagram, and I find your work nothing less than art. 👏👏👏👏
Impressive. MOST impressive. If I may ask, what is your background; did you study electronic engineering in the USMC or before/after, or are you self taught because you have relentless thirst for knowledge? ;) I can't wait till you fire up this thing for the first time. What will you examine as your first sample?
You've been driving me crazy post some schematics for your videos it drives me crazy not knowing what you're building or how the circuits are built the electron microscope project is perhaps the craziest thing but the most exciting one
You're mixing a lot of terms here, like voltage and current, electrons and light along with misunderstanding how old lightbulbs work (electron gun uses termionic (electron) emmision, while a lightbulb has to do with thermal (light) radiation). Together with some term-bombing for simpler concepts (like turning a current into a voltage) makes the explanation hard to follow and inaccurate, but I suspect it all comes from trying to shortly and simply explain rather than you not knowing as you obviously have come a bit on the journey and I'd love to see the process, component selection, the things you build yourself and challenges encountered in making that electron microscope!
You will need to isloate the device from vibrations, so that would include moving all pumps off the device, ditect to concrete floor, and then isolate that from footsteps, pumps may need to be isolated as well, why once a org i new turned down an electron microscope fir free as they would only be able to use it at night due to road traffic outside
Vibration will limit magnification, but it won't make it not work. When I was a teenager I spent a week cutting the tops off of weld samples at a pacemaker battery factory. It was 1979 and the factory laboratory had a "low cost" electron microscope. They used a small sample chamber, so the vacuum pumps could empty it faster. They were specifically studying the welds around the battery terminals, so they didn't need the rest of the stainless steel battery case. The weld sample battery shells were built without the lithium bromide chemistry. There were enough weld samples for it to be a statistically valid study. So they needed to look at hundreds of welds. This was about metallurgy, not magnification. The backscatter spectrum from each point identified the elements present. If the wrong element was present, they would zoom in on the defect to get a closer look, otherwise, the pictures were only about twice as large as the actual parts. So a magnification of just 2X. Needless to say, they weren't very worried about vibration.
I just commented on your last short. I can we get schimatics so if we want we can try ourselves when you finish? That would be intresting as ive been trying to build one myself for a while and the circuitry has been a pain in the ass as well as controling the electronbeam
How are you doing your high vacuum passthroughs? Ive had some success using spark plugs on my EM build but its overall not too reliable- been struggling with it for a while! Also, what phosphor are you using? Havent had too much luck with that too :) Some of those ebay listings look really familiar ;) Sick build so far, certainly a lot more elegant than anything I could come up with lol
![BLACK BAG - Official Trailer [HD] - Only in Theaters March 14](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/Du0Xp8WX_7I/mqdefault.jpg)
Awesome! Such a good looking machine! Can’t wait to see the progress.
Love the style of the video! No anoying cuts, not a 10 hour long intro/outro etc.
Didn't watch the video yet and i wana say that two days ago i was thinking that u would have huge potential if u started making videos not just reels and shorts , u got so much to share James , love your work since day one , keep it clean
Hot damn! I am relly looking forward to seeing what you're doing with the mainframe, and seeing the entire thing up and running.
Your passion is contagious! Super excited to follow along!
This is the coolest science dude ever
This is amazing work! Last year i began operating a SEM here in Brazil and i always wondered how hard would it be to build one from scratch. Now I’m rooting for you and excitedly waiting for your next update, keep it up!
Keep up the great work, that wiring is incredible, I love to see more kind of videos like this. ''a Thing of beauty and a joy forever''
You’re like a Top Gun Teacher! Luv how you explain things sooo simple. Super excited to see your upcoming projects.
Haven't even watched the video yet but so glad you made one, ive been following this project, incredible!
Bro I knew you were a nerd from your shorts but you’re great at explaining things directly and clearly but without stumbling. This was a pleasure to watch from the content to the pacing. Hope to see more!
So inspiring. Looking forward to seeing it complete
Just learned about crt a couple months ago and its really cool to see the similarities in the base of the build
Awesome, Brother!
I was a 6492, Aviation Calibration Tech, in the Marines from 1999-2007. Continued as a Metrologist for Lockheed at Stennis Space Center from 2004-2007, and a Turbofan Test Engineer for Lockheed and Rolls-Royce at Stennis from 2007-2012. Became a Control System Engineer from 2012-2018.
So, needless to say, I love this shit!
Semper Fidelis!
USMC 1999-2007
Wow! Get a load of this guy!! 😂That’s crazy man. I like to tinker, but diy scanning electron microscope?? Next level squared
Amazing work, and amazing explanation. You doing this alone is impressive, I hope I’ll do something like that when I have the money.
Your work is amazing !!!
A really great detailed explanation. Thanks!
Can't wait to see this ran up. I can see why your exited this is a lot of work. I've used a lot of SEM stuff over the years and still get excited to see the DIY stuff. keep it up ....cheers.
I hope your channel does really well, you make engineering fun
This is fantastic! Definitely can't wait to see it run. Thanks for the indepth explanation. 👍
The One Where James Makes A Scanning Electron Microscope at Home!!
This is really awesome, man!!!
Bro had an inspiration
Now bro is an inspiration ❤❤
So grateful for this. Thanks to the YT algorithm gods for tuning it my way!
This is excellent! Congratulations on your progress, I can't wait to see this work. It is going to be great...
we need more brilliant engineers and designers like you for the United States semiconductor electronics industry, please continue to inspire the next generation of engineers
This project is amazing, can’t wait to see it up and running!
What a fantastic challange!
I worked many years with one eletron microscope and it is amazing how to see an alternative microscopic world! Congratulations for your idea and for having courage to do such a complex project!
Greetings from Porto, Portugal 🩵
Loving your energy, excited to see what comes next!
Man this might be the most ambitious project I've ever heard of, it just looks amazing. I wonder what knowledge is needed to make this and how u learnt it, it seems really complicated but amazing
I’m so excited for this project bro. Very impressive stuff!
You should put together a cost and diy writeup. This would help to make scanning microscopes more accessible to average people who are interested in STEM.
This looks awesome! Id love to see more about the electron gun feedthrough and filament power supply. Keep up the good work!
Love your work!!! Been following you for 2-3 years now on instagram, and I enjoyed every second of that!! Please keep up the good work :)
This is crazy impressive. I will watch your career with great interest
Very cool project! Looking forward to seeing it working. Keep it up!
Wow this is amazing! Super cool stuff, loving the excitement you have while explaining everything! Best of luck! 😁
Super inspiring! Keep the faith through the troubleshooting phase. Then get a job at Thermo Fisher, Hitachi, JEOL, Zeiss
That looks amazing! I love the circuit board you showed! I can't imagine how long it must take to do all the soldering and keep the wires that neat
Real life Tony stark lmaoo this is super cool, im a sparky and Ive been collecting industrial automation parts for years that people toss in the scrap bin instead of servicing them. Not sure what im gonna make but my garage is full of cool parts like this. Got motors, valves, pneumatic and hydraulic stuff, tons of electronics, plc controllers, cables ect. I honestly like just dialing in my garage setup and slowly fixing the stuff.
dude, i saw the instagram reel just the other day and here you are on my recommended page. awesome work!
Wow ! That machine looks sick, I wan't to see it running keep posting updates ! Ben became very famous after making that microscope, got hired at valve, lots of good things apparently, nothing can stop a man with a purpose,
Cool, keep chasing the dream to make it true!
*I ASKED HIM FOR DETAILED VIDEOS* and he giveth - what a guy, and he does neat wiring
Keep the videos comin. This is great!
This is so sick man. Thank you for sharing
I like your funny words magic man, I cant wait to see more!
finally I see bros work I really want to learn about electronics please bro make a course on yt about it lots of love from india
Truly a fascinating piece of arcane machinery, profound technology
Awesome, really looking forward to seeing this progressing😀😀
Sick! I was thinking about building one as well, since I couldn't even find a not-working 2nd hand one. I'll be waiting for your next video.
Spreading inspiration. Awesome
This is incredible project! Please PLEASE document everything you are doing and shoot videos! I subscribed immediately :)
This is amazing! Would love to see the effective resolution of this.
👏 epic project to say the least . Inspired
Holy shit James, this is awesome
Thank you for the instruction.
My kind of people! Sick build
We will follow your project with great interest
I'm sat here looking proudly at my ages 8+ Lego car that I made and this guy is off building an electron microscope! Very interesting stuff can't wait to see it finished
Okay. That's cool!
I subbed.
I was wondering who you were that I've already subbed to you but you only have one video and then you showed that neat circuit board and I was like oooohhh
First of all: thanks for your service, second: this is badass
this is super duper dope
Keep it up bro, your work is amazing!!! Greetings from Costa Rica
Very excited to watch your progress on this! I remember seeing the Applied Science videos back in the day and dreaming of setting up my own. Do you think you'd release schematics of your build once you've got it up and running? Really nice work on the circuit boards
Love it! You're the type of guy i aspire to be. Where did you even start? Where did you get all the information on how to build this thing?
4:29 Einstein didn't discover the photoelectric effect, it was discovered in 1887 by Hertz.
Great project! I'm looking forward to seeing it working!
Einstein got a Nobel prize for accurately explaining the photoelectric effect that Hertz discovered.
Wow, amazing!
Looking forward to seeing how this turns out, very nice work. Earned my sub immediately 😃
Not to discourage you (as this is a truly formidable undertaking, and I envy your optimism) but the most critical part of a SEM is its objective lens. Unless one is willing to spend a few years of one’s life and get a PhD on this subject, it is rather unlikely that a crude DIY magnetic lens will produce anything even remotely approaching, say, a (sub-) 50nm spot to make the SEM effort worthwhile. Still, I sincerely wish you the best of luck with this project, and if anything it does make for an awesome YT video!
Someone get breaking taps in here stat, I just know he's gonna love this!
I'm a junior chemical lab technician, and this... "[This one is the goat]!"
I'm overly ambitious, so I really got the "I saw some wild shit I didn't think was possible, so I wanted to do it myself!". I didn't think, in my wildest dreams, that building an SEM from scratch would be possible..., but maybe we all tend to forget nothing really is?
You don't happen to have an NMR planned next, do you? ;p
Man this is so sick, you're inspiring me to want to try building one but I have a list of plasma related things i want to build first to test temporal/frequency pressure differential gradients. Is that $500 cable going to be a big deal? If you can find me a link, I may be able to contribute on that. No promises, but, i want to see you finish this project, sir. It's f.....cool.
Genius!!!
This is an insane achievement man. Do you have any advice for someone who wants to do projects involving electronics but has no experience?
Just start doing projects lol, think of small start you can design or make that involve electronics, then try to make it, research what’s needed, study new topics, most of what he learnt he was just research on electron microscopes,
Crazy for all the electronics to be on perfboard, would be easier to just make your own PCBs for cheap and easier to troubleshoot if you have any problems
👀 Real Art 🎉 👏
great work! keep it up bro
The first long form video at last! And of a homemade electron microscope!
hey cool stuff dude! I also love Applied Science! 👍😉
Neat. How are you going to do the focusing and steering coils?
White 'phosphor' in filament type lamp is not a phosphor but a simple coating to make difused light effect. Electrons emitted just by thermionic emission have much lower energy (order of 0.1eV, maximum electron energy can be derived from maximum electron energy at the filament temperature minus work function for filament material) than needed to excite phosphor. Fluorescent lamps use phosphor, but again it is not excited by electrons but by ultraviolet radiation emitted from filling gas at low pressure. They offten use argon and a trace amount of mercury vapour. When excited (by electrons of much higher energy, since continous discharge for fluorescent lamp happens at around 90V) mercury atoms emitt smal amout of visible light and very intense UV line at 253.7nm. This UV line excites the white coating phosphor that emitts few broad bands of visible light. When combined those bands 'look' like 'white' light.
Also, E-T detector is very delicate. It is fine detector when you are sure that the rest of your system works as intended. With the only sure benefit - the PMT being 'outside'. For testing purposes with enough beam current you can get away with simple faraday cup. Also, my professor of instrumentation electronics at college made scanning EM (as a grad student) back in 96', as i remember (maybe I'm wrong) he used photomultiplier (with faraday cage and acellerator electrode as in ET detector) directly. And I mean directly as in 'without the glass casing' (and scintillator). Simply, secondary electrons were attracted to faraday cage, accellerated, and focused to first PMT dynode. Ofc, microscope has to be at very very high vacuum. He used oil difussion pump, backed by turbomolecular backed by rotary pump.
Great work for the microscope, I follow You on Instagram, and I find your work nothing less than art. 👏👏👏👏
Impressive.
MOST impressive.
If I may ask, what is your background; did you study electronic engineering in the USMC or before/after, or are you self taught because you have relentless thirst for knowledge? ;)
I can't wait till you fire up this thing for the first time. What will you examine as your first sample?
holy moly i want one
Really cool I´m planing too to build my own ESM. But before i need to finish other project before xd
Now this is cool
You've been driving me crazy post some schematics for your videos it drives me crazy not knowing what you're building or how the circuits are built the electron microscope project is perhaps the craziest thing but the most exciting one
Id say to follow up with applied science.
No one would say you are in the spectrum, you come across as a perfectly adjusted individual (minus the diy eletron microscope)
You're mixing a lot of terms here, like voltage and current, electrons and light along with misunderstanding how old lightbulbs work (electron gun uses termionic (electron) emmision, while a lightbulb has to do with thermal (light) radiation). Together with some term-bombing for simpler concepts (like turning a current into a voltage) makes the explanation hard to follow and inaccurate, but
I suspect it all comes from trying to shortly and simply explain rather than you not knowing as you obviously have come a bit on the journey and I'd love to see the process, component selection, the things you build yourself and challenges encountered in making that electron microscope!
Incandescent bulbs with a phosphor coating on the glass is very unusual.
it is awesome.
I'm curious about the source you used to do this.
You will need to isloate the device from vibrations, so that would include moving all pumps off the device, ditect to concrete floor, and then isolate that from footsteps, pumps may need to be isolated as well, why once a org i new turned down an electron microscope fir free as they would only be able to use it at night due to road traffic outside
Vibration will limit magnification, but it won't make it not work.
When I was a teenager I spent a week cutting the tops off of weld samples at a pacemaker battery factory. It was 1979 and the factory laboratory had a "low cost" electron microscope. They used a small sample chamber, so the vacuum pumps could empty it faster. They were specifically studying the welds around the battery terminals, so they didn't need the rest of the stainless steel battery case. The weld sample battery shells were built without the lithium bromide chemistry. There were enough weld samples for it to be a statistically valid study. So they needed to look at hundreds of welds.
This was about metallurgy, not magnification. The backscatter spectrum from each point identified the elements present. If the wrong element was present, they would zoom in on the defect to get a closer look, otherwise, the pictures were only about twice as large as the actual parts. So a magnification of just 2X.
Needless to say, they weren't very worried about vibration.
SEM hackers discord getting ready for another wave of enthusiasts? :)
a millionth of atmo is not enough... but with a turbo pump you should get to 10^-6 millibar 😊 you can heat the walls with lamps to remove gas residues
I just commented on your last short. I can we get schimatics so if we want we can try ourselves when you finish? That would be intresting as ive been trying to build one myself for a while and the circuitry has been a pain in the ass as well as controling the electronbeam
I have no words
How are you doing your high vacuum passthroughs? Ive had some success using spark plugs on my EM build but its overall not too reliable- been struggling with it for a while!
Also, what phosphor are you using? Havent had too much luck with that too :)
Some of those ebay listings look really familiar ;)
Sick build so far, certainly a lot more elegant than anything I could come up with lol
hey man, found you on instagram and saw you posted a video on youtube. will be subscribing, keep up the good work
Hi, wonderful job, and great vidéo. Is there antway you'd take an intern for 3 months?