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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