Triggering CoolLEDs with HamFusion BNC cable - in Zen

Hardware
1

Hi All,

I have a Zeiss AxioObserver with CoolLED LEDS. Zen doesn’t talk to CoolLEDs, and I rely on having the LEDs ON all the time and using the shutter to expose the sample.
In an effort to do away with the shutter and gain some speed, I was told I can trigger the pe300 LEDs with our Hamamatsu Fusion camera with a BNC-SMA cable.
My question is what to do next, does anyone have experience of this in Zen (3.2) ? Do I need to identify anything in the MTB (device manager).

Note: I did get a CoolLED Colibri bridge working, kindly provided by CoolLED, but it seems to time out over long acqiusitions.

Any help would be great!

Best,

Darren

2

Hi Darren,

I was going to suggest the CoolLED bridge. I have had similar issues with long experiments and I never did get an answer as to why it would time out. The pE-300 does have a sequence mode that you can setup and trigger with the Fusion. You can also use this new universal translator to operate the pE-300 through Zen: https://advancedresearch-consulting.com/product/universal-translator/.

3

I can report back that it ‘just worked’ in Zen. I needed to do nothing except connect the CoolLED SMA - BNC port “trigger 1” on the Hamamatsu camera.

It then simply turned on the CoolLEDs by clicking live, snap or START. What I did do in Zen is make sure the fluorescence shutters was open for all the channels (there is an advanced tab that allows you to dictate what happens after acquisition - here is where the shutter needs to stay open, else it will keep closing after acquisition)

Small gains, but it’s great to get rid of the shutter!
Now I just need to go into everyone’s Zen config!