Thorlabs scope building blocks

At the SfN meeting in San Diego this year, I met Jeff Brooker from Thorlabs. Jeff and his team of about 17 people have a history of working together in industry on photonics. They have designed a series of modular pieces for custom 2p rigs. The pieces look great, and the ScanImage team is making a version to work with Thorlabs’ resonant scanner. It’s really high quality stuff, and the modularity means that you don’t have to make compromises to take advantage of their systems. If they price it right, this could be a very popular product line. There’s a bare bones imaging system which includes a deformable mirror for wavefront modification, a prechirper box, and a beam conditioner. And the resonant scanning system, which offers 512 lines at 28 fps, includes an FPGA-based outboard processor to handle the nonlinear scanning.

Svoboda’s group also presented their open microscope designs. One is a variation on the Sutter MOM scope which allows for better overfilling of large back aperture objectives. The other is a non-rotating design that uses no parts from Sutter. The details are available online. (link)