Dear HN, I wanted to submit one of the coolest open source projects I've ever seen - SerialEM. SerialEM is used to drive transmission electron microscopes, an their cameras. Electron microscopes are used in materials analysis, semiconductor analysis, and biological imaging of proteins, viruses, and cells. It's an important technique and the major technique used to see things past the light diffraction limit.
I thought SerialEM would be perfect for the HN audience because electron microscopes are massively expensive, precision, almost boutique instruments, and the software from manufacturers is horrendously bad and greatly limits their usefulness. SerialEM works on almost any TEM and camera combination, which involves writing plugins and scripts and handling bugs gracefully for so many obscure things. The physics of these instruments can be quite complex, especially at angstrom to sub-angstrom resolution. Furthermore, it's written almost entirely by one person (David Mastronarde) although lately he's had help from another (Guenter Resch).
And this isn't some nice to have, hacked together in a weekend project. This is the major way that the world's biggest EM facilities drive their microscopes. It's truly a hacker project, and has had real impact, with 10 pages of articles and citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C27&q=ser...
That's really neat. I have always kept an eye out for SEMs since they sometimes get sold for scrap prices, but have always been weary of the software. This might actually make me pull the trigger.
I thought SerialEM would be perfect for the HN audience because electron microscopes are massively expensive, precision, almost boutique instruments, and the software from manufacturers is horrendously bad and greatly limits their usefulness. SerialEM works on almost any TEM and camera combination, which involves writing plugins and scripts and handling bugs gracefully for so many obscure things. The physics of these instruments can be quite complex, especially at angstrom to sub-angstrom resolution. Furthermore, it's written almost entirely by one person (David Mastronarde) although lately he's had help from another (Guenter Resch).
And this isn't some nice to have, hacked together in a weekend project. This is the major way that the world's biggest EM facilities drive their microscopes. It's truly a hacker project, and has had real impact, with 10 pages of articles and citations: https://scholar.google.com/scholar?hl=en&as_sdt=0%2C27&q=ser...