[0xcde4c3db]

> I should also mention that commercial E-beam machines are pretty expensive (something like 1-Mil) but that I dont think it would be that difficult to engineer one for a mere fraction of that price.

I'm not sure where it was, but I remember a seeing a project where someone made a rudimentary homebrew electron microscope by chemically etching the tungsten filament from a light bulb (to get the tip sharp enough) and attaching it to a piezo buzzer that was scored to separate it into four quadrants. The filament could be moved by applying various combinations of voltage to the piezo quadrants.

I didn't find the one I was thinking of (which I think was ca. 2002 and so maybe just vanished by now), but search results suggest that variations of this have been done by several people.

[ynfnehf]

That sounds like a pretty standard STM (scanning tunneling microscope). They had a couple of those at the university I went to. We had to cut the tips ourselves with pliers, which was a quite annoying process as you couldn't see if they were sharp enough by eye (the tips were supposed to be only a few atoms thick). They seemed pretty cheap to construct, but they are not the same thing as a scanning electron microscope.