Imaging, Microscopy and More
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Into the Wild….
I’ve had an actual “job” since I was 15. Of course, my first work was mowing lawns as a kid, moving firewood, cleaning up rental houses, the usual “make a few bucks” stuff. When I was 15 I had a chance to become a beta tester for a book called something like “Windows 3.1 for…
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The TriggerScope Controller
I’m happy to announce a new product for microscopy, the “TriggerScope” controller system. I hope this device will prove itself useful in many areas of microscopy, but the basic idea is that it can drive scope components via manual control, TTL triggering, or PC control. Let’s say you have a laser and want to drive…
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Voltage Dividers
Happy New Year! I’ve been experimenting with a simple way of pulling a single power source into two rails, ad the simple solution is to use a voltage divider. One of the best explanations I’ve found on how these work is this excellent tutorial from SparkFun . Austin
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Adobe Brackets is a nice, free text editor
I recently was working on some file transfers using filezilla, when I needed to edit a php file. Filezilla has a “view/edit” option, so I clicked it figuring, “ah, this likely won’t work, but I’ll give it a try”. To my surprize, it launched a really nice text editor, which after some research turns out…
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NA vs. magnification, or why a 60x objective is brighter than a 100x
Microscope objectives are typically classified as being brighter or darker based on NA, or Numerical Aperture. This is for good reason, as the NA of a lens will affect both the amount of light delivered to a specimen (excitation) and the amount of light collected from a specimen (emission). In addition to this, NA increases…
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More on CMOS Rolling Shutter
A friend sent me an awesome and interesting article on petapixel with some excellent examples of how rolling shutters work on cmos cameras. (Thanks Hoy!) This is directly applicable to scientific CMOS cameras, IF you are using the “rolling shutter” method of capture. To make sure you capture an entire field of view in one single snap,…
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Useful tools (and where to get them)
PopMech has a little blurb on good cheap useful tools here But I’d add that the best place to find such tools is Harbor Freight. Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve found items like cutting tools, abrasive pads and the like to be of marginal quality, but for a lot of tools, you can’t beat…
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Aviation – the invisible highway
Looks like a great documentary – then again, I’m biased towards all things aviation 🙂 Aviation: The Invisible Highway (Trailer #1) from Aviation: The Invisible Highway on Vimeo.
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Long term considerations when building or buying an Imaging System
Years ago I worked for a major imaging camera supplier. During one meeting with a team of engineers, we were discussing some really cool aspects of a camera and driver suite for that camera. The engineers were showing us “kinetic accumulation” modes of capturing pictures, sort of an “HDR on chip” technique. My question to…
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10 Years of Cassini’s Look at Saturn
Some beautiful pictures of Saturn here. As a child my great uncle Dan, who worked on the fuel mixture system for the STS series shuttle, showed me saturn through a small telescope. I will never forget looking at those rings, and my wonder at how such a device could present such an image, funny how much…