Andor Neo camera integration into labscript

[Erbium Lithium]

Hello all,

We are looking to set up an Andor Neo sCMOS camera to work with labscript. Has anyone had any success with this application? This uses Andor's new SDK, SDK3 for sCMOS cameras. As pointed out previously on this forum, I believe the documentation has an error, as the iXon is an EMCCD camera and uses SDK2. My understanding is that SDK2 and SDK3 are incompatible. I see that there is a lengthy discussion about setting up the Zyla, and a link to this interface, but I am not sure how to translate that into a labscript device or if there was a firm conclusion reached. Apologies if I am missing something obvious. I would appreciate any guidance.

Best,

Jasmine Kalia

jka...@mit.edu

[dihm....@gmail.com]

Jasmine,

It has been quite some time since I've looked into the Andor camera software. It does appear that you are right and the `AndorSolis` device is an SDK2-based wrapper. Unfortunately developing for these cameras is rather annoying since the SDK is tightly controlled and fairly expensive. That said, our group is likely going to need to dust off the code soon-ish, so hopefully we could at least help each other.

As for the pyandorsdk3 interface, I haven't touched that in years. I suspect it would need some love just to run at all, and it very well may be antiquated anyway since there appear to be a number of python SDK3 wrappers out there now (including one in the SDK itself possibly, which is probably the preferred option). Before putting together any device, you should have a quick look at the many wrappers out there to see what is the most supported as well as performant. I ended up choosing to slightly modernize someone else's code to make the pyandorsdk3 wrapper because they had done a good job of optimizing the readout of a few frames by writing a more bespoke wrapper in cython. I'm too busy now to promise much, but could certainly help shake the dust off of pyandorsdk3 if someone were interested in doing the legwork.

Whatever the choice, a camera labscript device is actually fairly simple to put together (in the grand scheme of things). You'll end up making a subclass of the IMAQdx camera, with most of the important work being in the BLACS_worker that actually calls the SDK3 wrapper code.

-David

[Jasmine Kalia]

Hi David,

Okay, thank you for the response. I hope we can be of help to each other. I believe that I am going to end up using Andor's SDK3 python wrappers. I will post any questions and the finished device here once I have made some more progress on it.

Best,

Jasmine Kalia