If you have downloaded the latest version of Scanbox you may have noticed there is a new “Quadrature Encoder” panel and wondered what is does.
In addition to ball tracking, you now have the option of tracking the 1D movement of a circular platform. The position of the platform is monitored by an optical quadrature encoder that relays the information back to Scanbox. This allows for a trace of platform position to be displayed within the panel and saved along with the microscope data. Moreover, (and here is where the advantage over the ball is) the real-time position of the platform can be streamed to a second computer, which can use the information to control external stimuli in a closed-loop situation. Below is a simple demo, where the rotation of a square on the screen is controlled by the position of the platform.
The setup requires the use of a separate Arduino board and the code can be found within the quad/quad_encoder directory in the Scanbox distribution. Let me know if you are interested in setting up something like this and I’ll walk you through the steps.
Scanbox 