Electron microscopes - How we learned to stop worrying and love cheap lab equipment. (MCH2022)

A tale of sketchy^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hawesome online shopping, grimy scrap bins, and crazy DIY projects: The adventures of a few friends who set up an electron-microscopy lab (and much more!) without breaking the bank. For all audiences: whether you just want to see some cool micrographs, hear a story of hacker adventure, or, want to set up your own SEM - this should be a good time. This talk will have several parts: First we will tell you a story of a hobby that started with modifying an old classroom microscope for semiconductor imaging and has led to owning one, possibly two scanning electron microscopes (SEMs). You will see how 2020's logistics drama, COVID, language barriers, etc resulted turned the "simple" task of buying an electron microscope into a roller coaster of an adventure. Part two will look at the things we learned and what *you* should look out for if you want to get your own SEM: Things that will break, physics to watch out for, requirements for running it, and understanding the things that set different SEMs apart. Finally, we want to look at the future: Can we get a community of hackers building their own chips or replicating material science papers similar to the one we see abroad? Their achievements have been non-trivial to translate to European reality, but not impossible to. We hope to spur this on. about this event: https://program.mch2022.org/mch2022/talk/LE3MD7/