University of Redlands student Jonathan Paez and I worked on automating and calibrating a student constructed scanning tunneling microscope (STM) with the intention of using it for pedagogical purposes in an advanced laboratory course. We automated the STM by incorporating a linear actuator and LabVIEW. We were successful in creating three dimensional plots of graphite and gold surfaces and deriving calibrations to convert our data from voltages to distances. We discovered that our STM has nanometer-scale resolution
