Piezo Support

The piezo support keeps the piezo disk close and aligned to the coarse approach linear slider.
It’s specific to this project and is not mass manufactured.

Material

As described by Dan Berard in the page about the scan head, the selected material should be:

• Rigid, to prevent low resonant frequencies. You can imagine how bad a microscope made out of jelly would be. When the piezo shrinks or expand, we want the support to stay firmly in place and oscillate with the smallest displacement possible.
• Thermically stable. Since the distance of the tip and the sample is comparable to an atom, we want to avoid changes in the distance due to thermal expansion.

Additionally:

• Cheap. That’s one of the goals of the LiSPM.

The main candidates are:

• Aluminium. It’s rigid, mildly cheap, has an ok thermal coefficient. The machining can become expensive.
• Glass. It’s rigid, thermal coefficient close to aluminium. It is cheap if you pick a broken glass somewhere and cut it.
• Marcour. Too expensive, but excellent thermal coefficient.
• 3D printed plastic. As demonstrated by MechanicalRedPanda. Cheap, ok thermal coefficient, doesn’t require expensive machining. Not rigid.

I decided to use 3D printed PLA to make it ridiculously cheap.
I can also machine an aluminum bar at home.