Portable low-cost and highly accurate programmable triggering controller for confocal spinning disk image scanning microscope

Eli Flaxer; Alona Flaxer; Moran Sapir; Lanna Bram; Yael Roichman; Yuval Ebenstein

doi:10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113736

Portable low-cost and highly accurate programmable triggering controller for confocal spinning disk image scanning microscope

Ultramicroscopy. 2023 Jul:249:113736. doi: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113736. Epub 2023 Apr 6.

Authors

Eli Flaxer¹, Alona Flaxer², Moran Sapir², Lanna Bram², Yael Roichman², Yuval Ebenstein²

Affiliations

¹ AFEKA - Tel-Aviv Academic College of Engineering, 69107 Tel-Aviv, Israel; School of Chemistry, The Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, 69978 Tel-Aviv, Israel. Electronic address: flaxer@afeka.ac.il.
² School of Chemistry, The Sackler Faculty of Exact Sciences, Tel-Aviv University, 69978 Tel-Aviv, Israel.

PMID: 37031478
DOI: 10.1016/j.ultramic.2023.113736

Abstract

This work presents a very low-cost and highly accurate alternative way of implementing triggering control for a confocal spinning-disk image scanning microscope (CSD-ISM). Instead of using the previously reported hig-cost field programmable gate array (FPGA), that connects to a computer by an internal PCIe bus, we implemented the controller using a simple, low-cost real-time digital signal controller (DSC) development kit that connects to a computer via an external USB channel. The overall time resolution of the controller is better than 10 nanoseconds. The DSC programming is implemented using the free software included in the development kit and no additional commercial software is required. The operation of the CSD-ISM is performed by a 32-bit 150 MHz processor using the software environment Micro-Manager, a popular open-source platform for microscopy. Since software is used to calculate all the necessary times, the output signal is almost limitless.

Keywords: Fluorescence microscopy; Image scanning microscope; Spinning-disk microscope.