Austin's Imaging Blog

Category: programming

  • Countdown to a Revolution in Microscopy – Day 3

    Every so often I will get the chance to cook up some code for one of the usual software scope control packages. But these days, I spend most of my time in programs like Fusion360, Fritzing, and the like. So I guess this is how I feel when using the typical scope control software. How…

  • Arduino Mega 2560 Comparator

    Arduino Mega 2560 Comparator

    So I needed to set up an Arduino Mega as a signal processor. I had a sawtooth signal coming from a device, and I wanted to convert that signal to a 0/5V TTL signal. Now, with something like a sine or sawtooth wave, the question becomes, “At what point do I want to consider this…

  • ImageJ Counting Macro for Known Field Values

    Here’s a simple method to deal with varying intensities in a large run of images, assuming you have a known number of cells in a field. If I assume I should see, say, more than X cells per area, I can adjust my threshold to slowly increase it’s aggressiveness until that minimum counted value is…

  • WHY YOU SHOULD ATTEND THE UCSF/QB3 Microscopy Course

    Over the course of my career, I’ve flown across the US to attend a variety of imaging related instructional courses, all on the eastern seaboard. We are all familiar with the Woods Hole courses, the AQLM course, and so forth. What has boggled my mind is that here I am in the SF Bay area,…

  • The CNC Machine is done!

      So after 6 months of watching the guys at mydiycnc complete their manual, and roughly 4 months of building, I’m happy to post that I’ve finished the machine. I’ve written an extensive post on the last few days of building, on the build log here. I couldn’t have completed this project without the major…

  • Lumencor Spectra Driver Available

    I’ve written a Lumencor Spectra Driver that works with NIS Elements B3.2+. (AR or BR + Advanced Interpreter) The driver provides integrated control into elements for both intensity of lines and channel. These appear as a shutter and two filter wheels, offering full integration into Elements’ Optical configurations. We are selling it for $750, including…

  • Voltage output from NIS Elements, MetaMorph or uManager for under $200

    I posted briefly about this a while back, in my explanation of the demise of the parallel port. I finally got my hands on a National Instruments USB-6008 box, and have found the unit to be 100% compatible with any NI-DAQ controlling application. What follows is an example of how to set this up using…

  • Proper RGB Conversion of Multichannel Images

    When acquiring images in NIS Elements, it is possible to acquire each image with a color over that is approximate to the wavelength used for acquisition. This is the easiest way to view and relate multi-channel data, but when converting the images for export to other programs, it cam become a problem. In the image…

  • Determining background sources in fluorescence

    For microscopy engineers and suppliers like me, the background produced in an image is of importance, if that background is created by the imaging system itself. What so many of us on this side of the scope (vs the user side) forget to train on and talk about is the specimen side of the background.…

  • Photometrics LVDS cards on Win7

    I recently slogged through a tough install with a customer (Thanks Sean!!) in an attempt to run an older Photometrics camera using a PCI card in windows 7/xp. What we found was that the latest driver, (as of this post v. 2,7,10) is not working with PVDS cards! The solution for now is to roll…