I’ve been playing around a bit more with the Lasertec microscope. Looking at the literature Lasertec microscopes are often described as “Semi-confocal” this explains the lack of a galvo or anything that I could see that would deflect the light in X and Y:
So I suspect that the silver box at the top of the unit is the AOD and the detect (which is after all marked “slit detector”) is a silt detector!
I decided to pull out the CCD:
And cram a different sensor into the vacated void:
This for taking epi-illuminated images, this works somewhat reasonably:
I was pulling apart an old LaserTec C140 confocal microscope. Here are some pics! Here’s the main optical block:
There’s a photodiode, I assume with a pinhole and CCD sensor here:
On the other side of the unit there’s an FPGA.
Under the unit there’s a stepper (right) and a BL55 “Laserscale”.
I’ve been trying to figure out how all this fits together. The unit appears to be white light only, but I’m unclear on where the actuation is. It looks like everything is on the bottom of the unit. I guess the BL55 laser scale is used in combination with that stepper. But I’m not clear if there’s a full sub-micron precision XYZ stage here or if there’s something else going on. I was really expecting to see Galvos to scan the spot across the sample… hmmm.
I was trying to interface directly with the I2C on the Arducam Pivistation 5 Klarity camera module for… reasons.
Anyway I figured this would just expose the I2C on the IMX283… but it doesn’t seem to. There seems in fact to be another little microcontroller (GD e230f8?) there which uses a different I2C command set. It seems similar to the interface from this camera:
Anyway… I was able to get some info out of it using a Glasgow Interface Explorer. This note is here so someone else doesn’t waste time wondering why the IMX283 (which I think should respond on 0x1a) is responding on 0x0c on this camera.
The Glasgow commands required are below:
Also, it seems that you can crash the microcontroller pretty easily by doing additional reads?
My name is Nava Whiteford. I’ve worked for a few sequencing companies. I have equity in a few sequencing companies based on my previous employment (I try to be unbiased in my posts). You can contact me at: [email protected]
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