Last year I built a digital reflecting microscope, however, it took a long time to find graphene flakes on a Si/SiO2-wafer. Currently, another project from our school is facing the same problem.
Therefore, I decided to develop a program that finds graphene flakes automatically and marks them on a digital map of the sample. In order to realize this as cheaply as possible, I used Lego Mindstorms, which is intended for assembling and programming of robots. I built a microscope with a light sensor and two motors, however, it was only able to identify graphene in samples with high contrast. Looking into a more suitable system, I came across LabVIEW, which is a simple visually structured programming software from National Instruments, who kindly provided the Vision-Tool. This tool is capable of digital image processing and image recognition. Currently, my image recognition software is able to identify graphene based on shape and colour on still images.
