disable red power LED on miniscope body

[Michael Graupner]

Hello, 

I thought I read at some point that it is possible to disable the red LED on the outside of the miniscope body (V4) signaling data link/power. We are planning to record freely behaving mice in a dark condition, for which we would like to switch off the LED. Does this possibility indeed exist ? And if yes, how can I disable the LED ? 

Thanks in advance. 

Best regards,
Michael 

[Federico Sangiuliano]

Hello Michael. There are two possible ways of disabling the RED status LED. The first way is to directly remove the LED from the PCB. I wouldn't do this because in case you want to resolder the LED back it's very challenging to do with the risk of damaging the PCB. The second way is to modify the firmware of the microcontroller to disable the LED during the initialization. The code can be found on our Github repository. This would be the easiest and safest way of doing it. If you need further instructions let us know.

Thank you

Federico

[Michael Graupner]

Hello Federico,

Great! The firmware modification sounds like the way to go. Thanks for pointing me in that direction. I will have a look and let you know if I get stuck. 

Cheers,

Michael 

[Federico Sangiuliano]

Hello Michael. While working on something else I realized that the red status LED on the Miniscope can be disabled easily without modifying the firmware on the MCU or desoldering the LED. What you need to do is add the following code to the miniscope.json file found on the deviceConfigs folder. Once you open it scroll down to the Miniscope_V4_BNO.qml portion of the code and at the end of the initialize add the following:

            {
                "description": "Disable LED",
                "protocol": "I2C",
                "addressW": "0b00100000",
                "regLength": "1",
                "reg0": "0x06",
                "dataLength": "1",
                "data0": "0x00"
            }

If you want to enable the LED again you just need to change the data0 value to 0x01. I attached the json file for anyone else interested in trying this out. Please let me know if you have any questions.

Federico