Monthly archives: January, 2015

3D printed electronics

It’s been promised for a while now, but someone has to do the hard work to make it happen. That inevitably involves some pretty pitiful looking stepping stones on the way to the promised land….



Proper export for MATLAB figures

Getting nice figures out of MATLAB can be a challenge. Sometimes it’s fine, but if you’ve hit upon a figure that simply isn’t exporting nicely (bad vector rendering, lost transparency, etc.), check out the export_fig project



Colorbrewer for color schemes

Colorbrewer was designed for cartography, but is useful for figure color schemes and look up tables (LUTs). The web interface is slick, offers an immediate preview, and the look up table can be exported. Colorblind-safe and…



Time-bandwidth product

Ultrafast pulses are formed through interference of different wavelengths of light. Think of Fourier transforms, and how pulses can be generated through constructive and destructive interference of wavelengths with aligned phases. These wavelengths are close to the center wavelength, and spread over a wavelength bandwidth….



Arduino + x86 power

The Intel Galileo is an interesting mashup. It’s Arduino compatible. You can hand it to an undergrad and they can download the Arduino IDE and program it on their own with relatively little training. However, it’s…



Practical guide to optical alignment

This is a nice, quick, and practical introduction to optical alignment. A good place to start for training. By Rainer Heintzmann.



Python ephys and calcium imaging analysis code

Andrew Giessel wrote some analysis code in Python when he worked in the Datta lab. He has since moved on to another venture, but he open-sourced the code. There are import routines for data from ScanImage and…



TriggerScope for imaging system device control

Austin Blanco has designed and built an open-source system for controlling complex imaging systems called TriggerScope. It’s highly customizable out of the box, and both the firmware and software are open.