DetailExpanded Image Display & High-Capacity Data Logging
Discover the latest Nanonis software improvements: Display 10x more background images in the scan control module and benefit from high-capacity data logging with up to 100 million points per file and streaming support.
Continuous improvements are at the core of Nanonis software development, ensuring that researchers have the most efficient tools for their work. Even minor refinements can streamline workflows and enhance usability in unexpected ways.
In this update, we highlight two such improvements that have been integrated some time ago. First, the software now supports a significantly larger range of background images. Additionally, improvements to the data logger’s memory management ensure more efficient handling of recorded data.
Read on for more details on these enhancements.
10x more background images can now be displayed in the scan control module
Keeping images pasted in the background of the scan window as a reference for position, sample features, tip quality or other parameters is a very practical feature. The multibackground functionality provides an effective way to manage the images, decide which ones to pin to the background and which ones to replace with a newer image. However, up to now the maximum number of images was limited to 5.
This number has now been increased to 10 for Software V5 and to 50 for software V5e, keeping all the image management flexibility of the previous versions.
This feature is available for software V5 and V5e for Nanonis Mimea and releases R11950 and above (August 2022)
The data logger now supports up to 100 M points per file and data streaming
The data logger is more than a simple logging feature: It can log up to 24 channels with up to 20’000 points per second, and this in a gapless fashion. It can thus provide an option to store raw data separately from all measurements for later processing. Up to now, the data were buffered in memory, and to minimize memory consumption, the maximum number of points stored in memory was 25’000, resulting in a new data file being saved after this number was reached.
For fast measurements this limitation could lead to an extremely large number of individual data files stored to disk. To address this aspect, the data handling architecture has been completely overhauled: The raw data are streamed directly to disk and only 10’000 points are buffered locally increasing memory performance. With this change, the limitation of 25’000 data points per file could be lifted, and the maximum number of points per file has been increased to 100 million and is now user-configurable.
To further increase flexibility, the directory for data storage is also user-selectable and is no longer only the session directory.
This feature is available for software V5 and V5e for both Nanonis Tramea and Nanonis Mimea, and releases R11950 and above (August 2022)