Philips XL30 Environmental Scanning Electron Microscope (ESEM) control libraries and utilities (unofficial)

Under development

This repository contains a small set of utilities and control libraries for the Philips XL30 environmental scanning electron microscope (ESEM). This code is not associated with Philips or FEI in any way.

Current available components:

• The xl30serial.xl30serial module provides a simple interface to the XL30 using it's serial console server. Remote control via the serial interface has to be enabled on the console. This route of control has been chosen since DDE and shared memory via flat thunking is not working since the Windows 2K update. Unfortunately not all parameters like chamber pressure are available via the serial port - and transfer of images has to work via files. This library is under development and may change at any point in future. It only implements a small subset of the supported commands.

Installation

This package is available as PyPi package and automatically build on each tag by an automated build system.

pip install pyxl30-tspspi

Usage

Simple sample with internal methods

This simple sample currently uses private methods of the class. Usually one should access the microscope via it's base class from the pylabdevs project. This base class is currently under development.

from xl30serial import XL30Serial
from time import sleep

with XL30Serial("/dev/ttyU0", logger, debug = True) as xl:
   print(xl._get_id())
   xl._set_hightension(30e3)
   sleep(120)
   xl._set_scanmode(ScanningElectronMicroscope_ScanMode.FULL_FRAME)
   xl._set_imagefilter_mode(ScanningElectronMicroscope_ImageFilterMode.INTEGRATE, 1)
   while(xl._get_imagefilter_mode()['mode'] != ScanningElectronMicroscope_ImageFilterMode.FREEZE):
      sleep(0.5)
   xl._write_tiff_image("c:\\temp\\IMAGE.TIF")

   xl._set_scanmode(ScanningElectronMicroscope_ScanMode.FULL_FRAME)
   xl._set_hightension(0)