Austin's Imaging Blog

Imaging, Microscopy and More

  • Updating Software? A pre-chaos checklist…

    A few years after your shiny new system is installed, you’ll inevitably look at it just like you look at a car. What was once running flawlessly now has a few bugs, some dust, is slower and generally worn in. So, at some point you’ll decide it’s time for an upgrade. This may consist of…

  • Batteries need more charge – is this the answer?

    Looks like promising research! If this estimate of an 8x increase in storage capacity is correct, it could revolutionize transport, as this is the missing link to electric propulsion. -Austin      

  • Lumencor Sola Driver for NIS Elements

    Yesterday we received our first shipment of Sola white light LED driven sources for microscopy. I had a chance to snag one and write a driver for it. Price is $300 USD. The driver controls both the shuttering and  ND on the box, and integrates easily into Elements as a shutter and ND filter wheel.…

  • PhotoFluor 2 Driver for Nikon Elements

    89 North has asked me to cook up a driver for the PhotoFluor 2, which I am now hosting under my Macros & Journals page, or you can use this link. This driver works in NIS Elements AR, and BR with Advanced Interpreter. Please contact me if you have any trouble using it! -Austin  

  • Simple Low Cost Method for Laser Fiber Alignment

    If you have a laser launch, you may wonder if the launch is putting out the same level of power it did as the day it was installed. One of the difficult aspects of using a laser launch is that the single mode fibers required for launching, are very, very small! Lasers are coupled into…

  • More on LED Engines – Updated comparison against the Sutter DG-5

    About a month ago one of my coworkers, Aaron Lum Ph.D and I, had a chance to compare various light sources and to measure the power they provide. Most importantly, we were able to compare LED engines against other conventional light sources. As a followup, Aaron was able to work with Logan Grosenick from Stanford…

  • Extremely simple and inexpensive handheld camera mount

    There have been quite a few times I’ve simply placed my iPhone camera into a microscope ocular, so I could snap an image of an affect I was seeing. Along the same lines, this is a PVC pipe-connection for your run of the mill point and shoot camera. The images won’t be measurable in any…

  • The Highs and Lows of Working for Research

    So last week started off rather rough. About three months back I helped a customer avoid a software restriction, by replacing a controller card inside his computer. All went well, the card did it’s job, so on I went. It turns out that card needed some extremely precise performance. The card I used didn’t have…

  • Why is it STILL FUZZY?!?!

    Chris Murphy from Q-Imaging sent me this (Thanks Chris!).  Poetic… httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vHjuV7kRpFQ -Austin

  • High Speed Stage Testing

    Will be testing a high speed stage scanning method in the next few days, and will publish the output I get. ASI has some special firmware inside the stage controllers they use, that allows for high speed scanning. They also have 8 slide stages, so one can imagine how quickly a large number of slides…

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