Safe Stage - Electron microscope safe navigation

System for safe navigation of a stage and retractable devices inside a chamber of a scanning electron microscope.

This project was created as a part of a bachelor's thesis at the Faculty of Informatics, Masaryk University Brno.

Project parts

safe-stage

The safety system itself is written in Rust.

bindings

Bindings for the safe-stage Rust library. Currently, safe bindings only for C#, but unsafe header files are also generated for C and C++.

service-app

Desktop service application written in C#, WPF. Connects to safe-stage using the safe bindings.

Requirements

Running

Only Windows and .NET runtime are needed to run a compiled binary of the service application.

Building

• installed Rust with version 1.86 or newer
  • As of 18/12/2024, the Nightly version of the Rust toolchain results in a slightly better performance and is therefore recommended
• installed .NET SDK 8 or newer
• installed cargo-expand or selected nightly chain (run cargo install cargo-expand to install) - required for generating bindings
  • Nightly toolchain can be used as a fallback (running without cargo-expand), but might be unstable
• (optionally) setup miri with nightly toolchain to test undefined behavior
• (optionally) setup nextest to run unit tests with reports

MSRV (Minimum Supported Rust Version)

• 1.86.0 - floats in const context, trait upcasting coercion

Building

1. Enter the safe-stage directory
2. Compile the library with ffi feature and in release mode with cargo build --release --features ffi
3. Generate unsafe bindings with cargo run -p bindings
4. Go back to main directory and enter the service-app directory     - Use dotnet run --project ServiceApp to directly run it     - Use dotnet publish to create release build

When lost, try looking at the CI/CD pipeline and how it is done there.

Representative SEM

Exported STL files can be found here: safe-stage/models/src/assembly/thesis/models

Or can be viewed online in Onshape: https://cad.onshape.com/documents/694e38e8d979f14ad35f8ff9/w/1727b025a7bb93644c4c09d6/e/62cb081996d848e3b3a7ae06