Microscope Control Software

Microscope video (FOV width 500 um) of eucaryote (934kB Divx3-video)

Microscope Control Software

Hardware

At the MMVL a Linux software for controlling a Leica DM LAM microscope with a Basler A302fc IIDC/DCAM-compatible firewire camera has been developed.

Software

Features

The software uses OpenGL to display the camera image with a high framerate. The software already has the following capabilities:

• Move object table with mouse-dragging
• Camera-display with digital zoom (requires IIDC 1394-based firewire digital camera)
• Display and capture videos:
  • Colour images
  • Graylevel images
  • Edge images (thresholded Sobel)
• Capture focus stacks

Implementation

The implementation took maybe 15 days. Before being able to develop the application itself, the Mimas-library had to be enhanced with firewire digital camera input, the existing libserial-library had to be enhanced with timing functionality and the required part of the serial communication with the Leica DM LAM microscope had to be implemented under Linux.

Download

• You need to have Qt3 and libdc1394 on your computer.
• You need to install libserial-0.4.1.tar.gz (195 kByte).
• You also need Mimas-1.4 (12.2 MByte).
• Finally you need to install leica.tar.gz (32 kByte).

Gallery

Screenshot of Qt3 software controlling a microscope developed with Mimas

Image of syringe chip, captured with the software

Microscope image (FOV width 1 mm) of eucaryote (4.8MB video)

Microscope image (FOV width 500 um) (6.7MB video)

Microscope image (FOV width 100 um) of eucaryote (12.6MB video)

See Also

• Depth from Focus
• HornetsEye

External Links

• European Microscopy Site
• Leica Microsystems (on this site you can find the documentation of the serial protocol)
• David Attenborough - Life In The Undergrowth