| Re: Scanning Probe Microscopy [message #14520] |
Fri, 26 February 1999 00:00 |
Struan Gray
Messages: 178
Registered: December 1995
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Senior Member |
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Stuart Lindsay, Stuart.Lindsay@asu.edu writes:
> I'm interested in using IDL for analyzing SPM data
> and would appreciate any advice or links that will help.
As you probably know, Omicron have built their data taking and
analysis software using IDL. If you have one of their microscopes
they will sell you the IDL source code, which we ported to the Mac
very easily, even when we knew very little about IDL as a programming
language. It's mostly a question of adapting file system calls, which
in any case have been made much more portable in recent versions of
IDL.
In my group we now use mostly home-written IDL to analyse and
present data on various PC-class machines, and it's fast, powerful and
versatile enough for us. At some point I plan to kick everything into
shape and make it sufficiently presentable to release as
free/shareware but it's not ready yet. One of the strengths of IDL is
the ability to mix established processing routines and widgets with
new bare-bones prototypes, but it's also easy to end up with a lot of
sealing wax and twine holding half-finished modules together.
There are other packages which will read, measure and display SPM
images (including a free SPM-specific version of NIH-image that reads
all the major manufacturers' file formats), and for that alone IDL is
overkill if you're on a tight budget, particularly with the spread of
cheap 3D plotting into the PC world. There are also some things IDL
doesn't do well; in particular I don't think it's graphical output is
truly 'publication quality' and the user interfaces you can build are
fairly crude by today's standards.
That said, for extracting useful information from raw SPM data I
like it a lot. For investigating spectroscopy files I think it's
unsurpassed. My work relates STM spectroscopy to the crystal's
geometry and electronic structure, and for that I find IDL's mix of
built-in analysis, display and interface-building componants saves me
a lot of time and effort.
Struan
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