Part 1 - Introduction

First of all, here’s a list of what you’ll need:

1. One LEGO Mindstorms set
2. Some extra standard LEGO building blocks
3. One large LEGO building pad – available at toy stores
4. Two small solar cells – available at Radio Shack for about $5.00 each (extras are a good idea)*
5. Small mirror – will have to cut to proper size
6. Cylindrical or half cylindrical lens
7. Laser pointer with batteries
8. Velcro
9. Super glue
10. Small (about 1mm diameter) insulated electrical wire
11. Your choice of electrical connectors, but should be small and easily mounted to LEGO parts with glue*
12. Coaxial cable with BNC connectors at one end*
13. An oscilloscope or computer equipped with data acquisition board*
14. Although not necessary, it’s good to have a piece of plywood to mount your building pad on for stability

*There are varying levels of complexity you can take your LEGO AFM to. If you want to actually be able to read an electrical signal from a simple photo detector, then you will need the parts marked with an asterisk.

You will need a program to tell the scanner to scan in a rastering motion, like reading a book. This is fairly easily done using the LEGO programming language the Mindstorms system comes with. You can find a copy of my program here.

If you’d like to go one step further and read your data into a computer using a data acquisition board, you’ll need some software to do that as well. I recommend LabVIEW. Here is the program I wrote to read and store the data. You simply have to enter the numbers of the input channels for the top and bottom solar cells. The program subtracts the bottom signal from the top and displays it on the screen.

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