Xray map mosaic Z correction

[neko]

Hi All,

Just out of curiousity, does anyone know if newer versions of PeakSight (above 4.0) finally fix what appears to be a halfway-implemented feature of Z correction on multi-cell image acquisitions?

To wit: There are two icons in the image part of the Acquisitions program, one which has a regular grid, and one which has a wavy grid. For some reason, despite having a variation on the mosaic function, the wavy grid icon can only do single-cell image captures, but you can specify up to 49!!! Z-axis corrections. It would be nice to be able to make large area BSE maps without them fading in and out of focus as the sample slants slightly.

They sort of have that feature working right in the ImgMosaicOptic.exe that captures optical mosaics, except it seems that they don't interpolate the Z, they just reset the Z and move in a straight X-axis line until the next Z change (eg if your sample is slanted, it'll slowly go out of focus until the next Z shift, instead of using calculated intermediate Z values). There's a couple other bugs in this program, which I guess is why it's mentioned exactly nowhere and I had to discover it quite by accident. I get the feeling that they have no beta testing, they just work directly on production software and ship whatever they have when the time comes.

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that PfE has correctly implemented Z-axis correction and interpolation - I'm mostly curious as to whether or not Cameca has gotten their ship together in the past 12 years. If they haven't, that's just more ammunition for the justification part of a proposal to get PfE funded at our lab (which I hope to have at some point before I retire in 26 years - PfE 2030!!).

[Probeman]

I'm going to go out on a limb here and guess that PfE has correctly implemented Z-axis correction and interpolation - I'm mostly curious as to whether or not Cameca has gotten their ship together in the past 12 years. If they haven't, that's just more ammunition for the justification part of a proposal to get PfE funded at our lab (which I hope to have at some point before I retire in 26 years - PfE 2030!!).

The Stage mosaic acquisition interpolates the Z position for each sub-image over the mosaic area as seen here:

http://probesoftware.com/smf/index.php?topic=324.msg5044#msg5044

This is based on the Z positions of the four corners of the mosaic area.  Of course this assumes that one has a flat sample!  And technically a plane is defined by 3 points, so with 4 points it's actually over determined...   I'm reading a new Da Vinci biography and apparently he invented the ball bearing, and also thought that one should only use 3 ball bearings for load bearings... the thing is, in the real world, planes aren't perfectly flat!

However, the Stage mosaic is only for analog signals such as BSE, SE, CL.  For x-ray maps, Probe Image specifies 4 corners in the firmware call as does PeakSight.