When using the “Wellplate2” Macro with NIS AR you may have noticed a small but important limitation: Once you’ve loaded your specified sites into the 6D experiment, you can no longer make adjustments to the scope PFS offset. This means that for each experiment you run you either need the offset to stay the same, or you need to reload the sites into the ND window. I’ve made a simple workaround for this.
By running a small macro we can turn on the PFS, move the offset to a pre-determined value (that is defined by the user before running the experiment) and then disable the PFS while moving to the next plate.Here’s a walk through on how to set the macro up and on a description of the problem:
Problem: Note that the PFS values are off while I add sites to the experiment:
When I now enable to PFS the default values (0) are active. While this is not the case if I send the sites with the PFS on, I still cannot alter the sites in future experiments.
So when you install the macro (which can be found at the end of this post) you’ll need to set the macro up so that it runs each time elements loads. To do this go to the options menu and add the macro. Then set it as a “Start-Up” macro as shown here –
With that done we can restart elements and this will run the macro code.
Next we add the calls needed to the experiment to operate the macro. Your XY experiment window should look as follows in the “Advanced” section:
Finally we need to enter the value for the PFS offset. To do this select Macro menu, then Command, and choose the “Interpreted” command group. You should see three entries at minimum, one called “PFS_define_offset(). Run this command and enter the offset value you need for your experiment.
That’s it! Now each time your stage is moved to a new position this macro will override the PFS entered into the XY list and will set the value you specified in the step above. For ease of use the command above can be added to a menu entry or a button (using the layouts) if needed.
You can find the macro HERE.
-Austin