4DSTEM Mega Navigator
(A freeware 4D navigator for 4D-STEM data analysis)
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last update: 31.03.2026
Highlights (new features are marked in red):
- No installation required (portable) – just unzip the file (download link above) and double click the run.bat file.
- Supported formats:
- Zarr (.zarr folder)
- NumPy Compressed (.npz)
- NumPy Array (.npy)
- NanoMEGAS Blockfile (.blo)
- Dectris Arina (.h5)
- File conversion:
- Merlin MIB (.mib) files to Zarr folder
- TFS Velox MRC files (.mrc+.xml) to Zarr folder
- Build virtual apertures: BF, ADF, HAADF, Bragg & Bragg grid.
- Strain (µProbe) mapping analysis. REMARK: Not fully tested – use with care !!!
- COM & DPC/iDPC analysis. REMARK: Not fully tested – use with care !!!
- Manual Navigator (nm/px) and DP (nm-1/px) calibration.
- Semi-automatic central-beam (CB) alignment.
- Zoom to region of interest (ROI).
- Change the color maps (cmap) of the Navigator and the DP.
- Includes two folders with examples of 4DSTEM datasets (synthetic & real data).
- Sub-pixel movement of the detectors and the bragg discs.
- Scalebars added for calibrated Navigator and Diffraction.
- File saving with and without overlays.
- New tab for selecting and cropping the large dataset + saving the reduced dataset as Zarr or NPZ.
Future Features:
- Support for more file formats and file conversions.
and more …
Software Libraries Used in 4D-STEM Mega Navigator:
The following external libraries were used in the development of the 4D-STEM Mega Navigator.
Core Scientific Libraries:
- NumPy – Harris, C. R. et al. (2020). Array programming with NumPy. Nature, 585, 357–362. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2
- SciPy – Virtanen, P. et al. (2020). SciPy 1.0: Fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python. Nature Methods, 17, 261–272. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-019-0686-2
- Matplotlib – Hunter, J. D. (2007). Matplotlib: A 2D graphics environment. Computing in Science & Engineering, 9(3), 90–95. https://doi.org/10.1109/MCSE.2007.55
Large-Scale Data Processing and 4D-STEM Libraries:
- LiberTEM – Clausen, A. et al. (2020). LiberTEM: Software platform for scalable multidimensional data processing in transmission electron microscopy. Journal of Open Source Software, 5(50), 2006. https://doi.org/10.21105/joss.02006
- Dask – Rocklin, M. (2015). Dask: Parallel computation with blocked algorithms and task scheduling. Proceedings of the 4th Python in Science Conference. https://doi.org/10.25080/Majora-7b98e3ed-013
- Zarr – Zarr Developers. Zarr: An implementation of chunked, compressed, N-dimensional arrays for Python. Software available at https://zarr.dev
- Numcodecs (Blosc compression) – numcodecs Developers. numcodecs: A Python package providing buffer compression and transformation codecs. Available at https://numcodecs.readthedocs.io
- Quantem – quantem Developers. quantem: Electron microscopy data handling tools for Python. Available at https://github.com/electronmicroscopy/quantem
Graphical User Interface Framework:
- Qt for Python (PySide6) – Qt Company. Qt for Python (PySide6) Documentation. Available at https://doc.qt.io/qtforpython-6/
