Data collection software

From Physics 111-Lab Wiki

All pages in this lab

I. Brownian Motion in Cells

II. Staff Sign-off Sheet (BMC)

III. Simulating Brownian Motion

IV. Microscope HowTo

V. Data collection software

VI. Particle tracking software

VII. All-in-One RealTime Software

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The movie capture software

The movie capture software, Octopus 111 (Download), is written in Visual C# and, primarily, does two things:

1. it interfaces the camera to the computer, and displays the camera data on your screen.

2. it allows you to capture movies to the harddrive. Movies are stored frame by frame, in .bmp format.

Using Octopus 111

• Launch the Octopus 111 application by selecting Start->Octopus 111
• The window on the left contains camera controls as well as parameters for recording movies.
  • Adjust the gain control in combination with the microscope illumination level to get a good picture. Notice how the noise level changes with the gain setting. In dark-field mode, results can often be improved by sending 100% of the light to the camera with the Sideport Setting Wheel (23).
• The pass-through window on the right is a live view of the entire image seen by the camera.
  • Only the portion of the movie inside the red box will be recorded.
  • Re-center the red box by clicking in the pass-through window.
  • Re-size the red box by shift- or control- clicking in the pass-through window. The control key will constrain the box to be square.
  • You can also adjust the capture area by typing new values into the “Capture Area” control or using the up/down buttons.
• Set the desired sample rate and enter the number of frames you would like to record.
• Press the “Start” button to begin capturing a movie.
  • By default, movies will be recorded into the “Movies” subfolder of your “BIO Lab Work” directory. This is also where the Matlab scripts look for movies by default.
  • Each movie will be stored in its own directory.
  • To avoid accidentally recording over movies, the movie name will be appended by a number that increases after each capture.
  • Movies are stored as sequentially numbered .bmp files. Use thumbnail view when looking at them in Windows.
  • A file with the movie parameters and a list of all the frames are also created.