meta data for this page
  •  

This is an old revision of the document!

Zeiss DSM 962

Our second scanning electron microscope. Nicknamed 'Kevin'. Quick specs:

Maximum acceleration voltage: 30kV

Spot size: 4nm @30kV, SEI

Manufacturing year: 1995 (?)

Attachments/options: Beam blanker, motorized stage, NORAN EDX

Electronics

The DSM 962's main display is powered by the BIVAS, a separate box interconnected to many of the systems of the DSM itself:

PC Side

The PC side of the BIVAS contains a Piads SBC288, a D3142 MFM hard drive, connected to a FINLUX MD640.350 electroluminescent display.

CPU

The SBC is (presumably, Source) powered by a 12MHz AMD-N80L286.

Harddrive

The harddrive is a NEC 3142 44MB MFM hard drive. In contrast to Source in the DSM's BIOS it must be configured as type 29: 1.024 Cylinders, 8 Heads, 17 Sectors.

Displays

The DSM supports up to three displays, the main display (built-in EL display) plus two external displays. Supposedly, the second external display is used by the EDX system (Todo: verify assumption), while the first external display is used to show images to the user (see image above, the screen on top of the DSM is connected as the first external display).

The main display's pinout seems to be the following: Source

Software

The SBC runs a version of DOS 5.0 and a Zeiss/LEO-custom control software. Currently, version 2.3s seems to be installed; however we also possess the installation and boot disks for a version 2.0 and 2.13 (supposedly the DSM was originally shipped with 2.0 and then upgraded in the field later).

  • V2.0 (C)92 Carl Zeiss
  • V2.13 (C)93 Carl Zeiss
  • V2.30 (C)1996 LEO GmbH

Part of the boot up is calling a program called init_sbc that supposedly restores (some of the) SBC's bios settings.

Bringup

The SBC's CMOS Battery is completely dead and so it looses all settings on power down. Unfortunately we were unable to find an account of the original settings, yet we were able to bring up the DSM through a mention of the hard disk settings in one of the AUTOEXEC.BAT files on the installation disks.

The current bringup procedure is as follows (improve if you can!)

  1. First turn on the DSM and let the CMOS checksum check fail
  2. WAIT for the first timeout (if you press F1 directly, all CMOS defaults are cleared and extended memory will not work)
  3. Press F1 and change the Diskette drive-0 to 1.4 Mb Fix-disk drive-0 type to 29 (no other drive settings know as of yet)
  4. Store the settings (F2) and let the DSM boot