News, releases, updates
Luke Campagnola
Howdy patchers,
Lots of news to report this evening!
* I will be presenting ACQ4 in a dynamic poster at SFN on the morning of Monday the 13th (http://www.abstractsonline.com/pp8/#!/4376/presentation/18187). If y’all are coming, I’d love to meet you in person and hear about how you are using acq4. I would also be happy to spend time outside of the poster session for more in-depth discussion and coding. The Sensapex folks are also planning to have a demo of their hardware running acq4, so be sure to give them a visit as well J
* I have been using acq4 at the Allen Institute for the last two years and have been working on many new features. They’ve been pretty stable for the last several months, and tonight I merged them into the mainline develop branch. Although I did a lot of testing before this merge, it’s pretty unlikely that I did not break something that you depend on. I tagged the commit immediately preceding the big merge with the name “acq4-0.9.3”. If you are running a production system and you don’t want it to break, base all of your code changes off of that point for now. If you are developing new code and would like to stay up to date with the latest, give the develop branch a merge and let me know how it goes for you.
Some highlights from the latest update:
* New “Multipatch” module and pipette control tools that make it easy to manage multiple pipettes / electrodes. Click on your pipette tips once to calibrate, and then click on your target cell and the pipette moves automatically into axial alignment with the target. Combined with support for customizable XKeys keyboards, we have a nicely streamlined interface that we have been using to do octuple patch recordings.
* Light sources – automate control of illumination sources and store metadata with images. We have been using this to keep track of which fluorophores are being excited in each image.
* PatchPipette device class – this is the beginning of the infrastructure that we plan to use to implement more patch automation (pressure control, automatic seal/break-in, automatic blind patch, etc.)
* Sensapex uMp device support
* Lots of updates to Scientifica device support
* More powerful image processing in MosaicEditor, new tools for annotating and saving mosaic scenes.
* Merged in the latest updates from pyqtgraph
* Many-many other bugfixes and minor enhancements
Cheers!
Luke