Portable low-cost and highly accurate programmable triggering controller for confocal spinning disk image scanning microscope.

This work presents a very low-cost and highly accurate alternative way of implementing triggering control for a confocal spinning-disk image scanning microscope (CSD-ISM). Instead of using the previously reported hig-cost field programmable gate array (FPGA), that connects to a computer by an internal PCIe bus, we implemented the controller using a simple, low-cost real-time digital signal controller (DSC) development kit that connects to a computer via an external USB channel. The overall time resolution of the controller is better than 10 nanoseconds. The DSC programming is implemented using the free software included in the development kit and no additional commercial software is required. The operation of the CSD-ISM is performed by a 32-bit 150 MHz processor using the software environment Micro-Manager, a popular open-source platform for microscopy. Since software is used to calculate all the necessary times, the output signal is almost limitless.