Creating Your First Recipe

When you first open the Recipe Realtime View, the view opens with a blank new recipe entitled Untitled1.rcx. The first node in every recipe (the root node) is titled My Recipe. Each recipe has only a single My Recipe node.

The Parameters for the root node are shown on the right hand side of the recipes screen when the node is selected (highlighted). The root node is where the user specifies the capture and report directories. The default values are:

• D:\Capture
• D:\Reports

Additional nodes are added to the recipe hierarchy by right clicking on the node which shall be the parent node for the new node. That is to say that the new node will be the child node of the selected node.

Right click on the My Recipe (root) node, and select Real-time to create a Real-time node as a child node of the root node:

Right click on the newly created Real-time Configuration node and, under New, select Alignment / Origin. The new node, entitled Alignment / Origin 1, will appear as a child node to the Real-time Configuration node:

The XYZ coordinates stored in the Alignment / Origin 1 node are the coordinates from which all of the other sites in the recipe will be referenced. Although it is possible to manually enter coordinates by typing them into the appropriate fields in the parameter list, it is highly recommended (and very easy) to teach the location of the origin using the Professor.

The Alignment / Origin professor will lead you through a series of steps to teach the location of the sample origin that all sites will be referenced to. To initiate the process, click on the Professor icon while the Alignment / Origin 1 node is selected (highlighted):

The first step of the Alignment / Origin professor asks you to enter the percentage of maximum stage speed movement. The default is 80%.

1. Click Next to proceed:

The next step asks if you would like to move the stage to the previously saved location, or to leave it in the current location. Regardless of the choice, you will still have the option in the following steps to navigate to your location of choice. This option is intended to bring the stage to the approximate location.

Because this is a new recipe, the saved XYZ location values are at their default values of 0.00 μm. Thus the user would most certainly want to leave the stage in the current location. Were you to select Move stage to above location, the stage would move to its extreme locations of XYZ coordinates.

2. With Leave stage in current location selected, click Next:

3. The Professor will ask you to choose a coordinate system, Cartesian or Polar, and an alignment mode. The options are to use a single origin location to align to, or to align with deskew angle compensation to account for slight rotations from one sample to the next. For more about Deskew alignment procedures see Advanced Realtime Recipe Techniques.

Select Origin Only and click Next:

4. The Professor then opens the Setup window. Even if the Setup window is in focus, the Professor will still appear over the window. Move the Professor window out of the way, and Align the Laser on the Probe tip. Proceed with focusing on the tip. Align the tip with the cross hair in a consistent repeatable fashion.

5. After the tip is brought into focus and the cross hairs placed, click Next in the Configure Alignment/Origin Parameters (Professor) window. This opens the Navigate window.

6. Adjust the Z Motor to Focus on the Sample, and move the XY stage to the proper location for the origin (Navigate to Scan Centerpoint).
7. Click Next in the Alignment/Origin Professor box to continue.
8. Click Finish to complete the parameter configuration. The XYZ coordinates will appear in the parameter list of the Alignment /Origin node.

Right click on the Real-time Configuration node and select New > Auto Tune to create an Auto Tune node as a child node of the Real-time Configuration node:

Nodes that are child nodes of the same parent node are sibling nodes. Such nodes may be interchanged in position by dragging one sibling node onto the other one.

Exchange the position of the Auto Tune 1 node and the Alignment / Origin 1 node by dragging the AutoTune 1 node onto the Alignment / Origin node. A horizontal arrow will appear over the destination node when it is ready to swap positions of sibling nodes:

When run, the recipe will perform the actions of each node in a top to bottom serial format, so changing the order of how the nodes appear in the recipe hierarchy actually changes the order of the actions that the recipe performs.

Using the steps you have learned above, add the structure Site > Measurement > Capture Image > Image Export to the Alignment/Origin node.

Each node successive node should be a child node of the previous one. Create each node by right clicking on the appropriate parent node. The resulting structure should look like the window below:

The measurement node contains all of the engage and scan parameters for the microscope. When you first create the node all of these parameters are gray, and the setting called Load these Parameters When Run is set to No.

Once again, the Professor is available to teach the parameters of this node. Because there are so many scan and microscope control parameters involved in every measurement, the individual parameter values are not listed with data entry boxes, and thus these parameters may ONLY be taught by using the Professor.

1. Select the node Measurement 1 and click on the professor link:

2. The Measurement 1 professor opens the Scan Parameter List window. Even though this window is in focus, the professor box is always on top. Move it away from the Scan Parameter List window and set the scan parameters appropriate for your sample. Take care to set the proper scan mode, scan size, resolution, and gains:

After completing the Measurement Professor, the lists of parameters are no longer grayed out. Expand any of the lists of parameters to see the taught parameters. The Professor may be rerun if necessary to re-teach or change any of the scan parameters.

Notice also that the Load These Parameters When Run parameter is now set to Yes. If this parameter were to be changed to No then the system would continue with the engage and capture process without changing the system's state. Leave this parameter set to Yes.

Select the node titled Capture Image 1. The default parameters are shown below:

The Image Export node has the capability to create an exported image file from a NanoScope image file. The supported image export formats are:

• .jpg
• .bmp
• .tif (8 bit color, 8 bit greyscale, or 16 bit greyscale)

The default value for the File Name field is:

<ParentFileName>_<FileExportChannel>

Strings encapsulated in brackets <> are special metatags. Metatags allow the user to populate certain fields such as file names and file text tags with value of XML parameters from the recipe, or with scan parameters.

In this case, the file created by this Image Export 1 node will be a concatenation of the name of the parent NanoScope image file (<ParentFileName>) and the name of the export channel (<FileExportChannel>), separated by an underscore. Because the Parent NanoScope image name is the value from the Capture File Name field of the Capture Image 1 node, and because the Export Channel is set to Channel 1, the resulting .jpg file name will be:

Capture Image 1.000_Channel 1.jpg

Nodes may be copied and pasted along with their entire sub-hierarchies. All of the taught values of these nodes are copied as well.

1. Right click on the Site 1 node and select Copy:

2. Right click on the Alignment / Origin 1 node and select Paste:

3. Repeat the Paste process once more to create a third site.
4. Rename the pasted sites Site 2 and Site 3.
5. Rename the Measurement, Capture Image, and Export Image nodes appropriately.
6. Set the coordinate values of Site 2 and Site 3 either by teaching the coordinate values with the Professor, or by simply typing in values to the X and / or Y properties of the sites:

Right click on the My Recipe node and select Report to create an XML report of the results of each step of the recipe run:

Select Save Recipe from the file menu and select an appropriate file name and directory path to where you want to save your recipe file:

Once the recipe has been saved, close the Recipes realtime view.