Measuring the gain of your imaging system
Posted in Hardware
The images obtained from a 2-photon laser scanning microscope, or a CCD-based system, consist of an array of pixel values. For 8-bit images,…
Monthly archives: July, 2010
Color-code terms in equations
Posted in Tips
This is such a simple and powerful trick, I don’t know why I hardly ever see it used. When giving an equation during a talk or in a paper, typically that equation is best understood as a series of terms. Those in your audience who are familiar with the terms, like yourself, will instantly recognize…
Open Science Summit: This weekend
Posted in Tips
Thursday through Saturday this week, there is an Open Science Summit in Berkeley. The schedule includes Josh Perfetto from the OpenPCR group I’ve mentioned before, Martha Bagnell from The Third…
Street fighting mathematics
Posted in Tips
Physicists have a very unsentimental way of manhandling mathematics. In addition to setting up dimensionally inconsistent equations for order-of-magnitude estimations, they like to take lots of short cuts that make computations fast and…
Laser-like water jet cutting
Posted in Hardware
Micro Waterjet has an abrasive-based technique that enables laser-like precision for machinging small parts. The benefits are: no heat damage/distortion, and materials that are toxic when burned can be machined to laser…
High power LEDs
Posted in Hardware
About 10 years ago, as high power LEDs became available, many quantitative microscopists started changing over from arc lamps to LEDs for illumination because of their rock solid intensity. Philips Lumileds have…
Daltonize your figures for the colorblind audience members
Posted in Tips
I’m revising figures for a paper right now and the editors suggested I avoid red-green color schemes. In the US, 7% of men are colorblind, usually red-green colorblind. The editors suggested …
Cleaning objectives and other optics
Posted in Tips
Microscope objectives, in particular, the water-dipping variety so common in physiology and imaging labs, get dirty. Salts build up on them, traces of drugs stick to them, and biological membranes accumulate. It’s best…
New filters from Semrock
Posted in Hardware
Look at this transmission spectrum from Semrock. It’s a nearly perfect step function. You want to know about the optical density outside of the transmission band? Over 7 outside of the 500-550nm…
More optomechanics resources
Posted in Hardware
I recently covered some alternative optomechanics sources beyond the usual suspects like ThorLabs and Newport. Here are a couple of less well known optomechanics shops.
The unfortunately named Eksma Optics has…
Bolt sizes
Posted in Hardware
Does the length of a cap screw include the head? How many threads per inch for the fine version of a 1/4″ bolt? Bolt Depot has all of this information neatly collected in…
Switching 120 and 220 volt outlets
Posted in Hardware
Switching wall outlets remotely, via the parallel port of a computer, a microcontroller (e.g., Arduino), or other simple switches, is desirable in many rigs. For example, timing/triggering lights in a behavioral environment, switching equipment on and off remotely, or coordinating the…
Intrinsic imaging tips
Posted in Tips
Intrinsic signal optical imaging is a functional imaging modality where the reflectance of red light indicates active portions of cortex. It is used for many applications, including imaging individual barrels in rodent…
Catalogs as textbooks
Posted in Tips
Many manufacturers distribute catalogs that include extensive tutorial sections. You could really teach a pretty extensive engineering course on optics using nothing more than the front pages of the CVI Melles Griot catalog. In this post I’ll point you to some of…
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