Microscope Control Software

Screenshot of software controlling a microscope developed with Mimas.

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 Qt 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

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)

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

See Also

• Depth from Focus

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