Matching Motors to Microscope Stages

I used to be a field service engineer for a system in the 80's & 90's called HEMATRAK. This was a medical laboratory device, basically a moterized micropscope stage connected to a pattern recognition computer that would analyze hundreds of scans. We used stepper motors with linear shafts to move the stage around by very small steps. The driver circuitry was maybe be a little sensitive, speed, accelleration, etc.

It worked well, but I'm not sure if your other devices would be better. The company I now work for has a similar (updated) system. I'm not yet trained on it, but I can find out about it's stage movement. ss

I work for a major automated stage manufacturer and can safely say that the article has not even begun to touch on the modern ways we move stages right now. We also use correction which is hardwired into the stages for the controllers to work with. These corrections are determined in the test phase of the manufacturing and go from linear one value correction to full stage mapping.

In the real world, everybody, including laboratories, want value for money. It is rarely seen that a particular device needs to be accurate in both accuracy dependent characteristics, namely the metric accuracy and the repeatability. Metric accuracy is the absolute accuracy that determines how well the stage moves a particular requested distance. The repeatability determines its accuracy in repeating a particular move and this can be subdivided in unidirectional and bidirectional repeatability. Like I mentioned before it is highly unlikely for a stage to need both characteristics at the same time so the question whether there is a "better" system completely rides on the consumers willingness to spend the prohibitive amount for a system that is "as good as you can get it" in both parameters or how much they really need it.

We use stepper motors with micro stepping and precision ground ball screws in various pitches. We test our stages before shipping and verifiably certify the bulk of our stages to perform to 1nm while some selected products, mainly the ones with encoders fitted, will live up to a minute 0.2nm.

If you need anything better you have one hell of an application and you should indeed look for slower, shorter and piezo driven linear devices.

It states that typically the automated stages are between 2 to 4 inches. This may be regarded as roughly true but our stages vary between 2x3 to 16x16 inch. The bulk of the sales are in the smaller ones up to 4x5 inch.

Nice article but wished for more details and more angles. Seems a bit shallow and could benefit from more elaboration.