This organization was created for the Mechanical Engineering Capstone Scanning Electron Microscope (MECSEM) team.
It contains most of our simulation and design code, mechanical and electrical designs, drawings, software/firmware, documentation, and related project materials.
Note: We are currently cleaning up and publishing our work, including reports, presentations, design files, and supporting documentation. Stay tuned for updates.
Pending stuff:
- Mechanical designs, including the vacuum chamber and related assemblies
- Electron optics design code and models
- Reports, presentations, and supporting technical documentation
MECSEM is a UWaterloo final-year capstone project to develop a basic scanning electron microscope. We engineered the whole system from the ground up; everything short of the vacuum pumps and the PC we run our GUI on.
Team and primary roles:
- Cristian Bicheru: Team lead, electrical, firmware, backend
- Adam Lastovka: Optics (lenses & deflectors, column simulation), GUI
- David Choi: Mechanical, vacuum system, optics (electron source & detector)
MECSEM was developed from Spring 2025 to Winter 2026. During the Fall 2025 term, we participated in the Entrepreneurship Co-op program, which allowed us to work full-time on the project.
We gratefully acknowledge the Esch Foundation, Techyon, and Ansys for their generous financial support, without which this project would have been nearly impossible.
Our work is licensed under the GNU GPLv3 license.