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Automation of the ERD lab
INTERNSHIP PRESENTATION
IMEC – 7TH AUGUSTUS, 2015
MOHAMED BELTAGY
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Mohamed Beltagy
M.Sc. In Embedded systems design at USI in Switzerland
Master thesis for the Automation of the ERD lab
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What is ERDA ?
It is an Ion Beam Analysis technique in materials science to obtain elemental concentration depth profiles in thin films.
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Timing gates
Energydetector
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How the measurement is done ?
Sample
Data Acquisition
Charge counter
Ion beams
Timing Gates
Energy detector
Recoiled atoms
Computer
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MotorVertical Motion
MotorRotate and Align the sample
sample1
Sample2
sample3
sample4
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What is the problem ?The Sample has to be aligned manually for each measurement which means it is only being used
during working hours!
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My goal and how I will achieve it?My goal is to automate the measurement operation.
I am building a software that controls all the motors ,charge counter
and data acquisition the take the measurements autonomously.
That is scriptable ,reliable and user friendly.
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The motor and charge counter and data acquisition set up
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Motors
Charge counter
Data acquisi
tion
Master program control all the pieces
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The device (motor or counter etc.)
How the system works ?
The Master program (GUI)
It can be in any remote computer
The engine text file
The result text file
Single device Deamon
Have to be in the lab computer
The device (motor or counter or data
acquisition) These files can be in any remote computer
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What is an engine file ?• A text file where I write what I want the device to do.• It can be edited easily by any scripting language • The master program can be written in any programming language• It is easy to modify the software for any other device
For example
Set_count_preset 500
I want the charge counter to count till 500 and then stops
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What is a daemon?
It is a computer program that runs as a background process, rather than being
under the direct control of an interactive user.
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How the daemon work ?
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Autonomous software Reads the
engine file for the first time
Send the commands to the device and
receive the response
Read the engine file
If the engine file changed
If the engine file didn't change read it again
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Conclusion and future work • To build the data acquisition software • To build the Master program that controls every thing