The latest Scanbox release brings a major performance improvement. The main bottleneck in the acquisition loop consists of a function that re-arranges the incoming pixel stream into the images that are displayed and stored in real-time. This function now makes use of OpenMP to distribute the work among different physical cores available in your machine and thereby improving the performance in your machine.
Performance improvements should be reflected in your ability to scan at higher rates in both unidirectional and bidirectional modes without running into a buffer overflow fatal message.
The number of cores used in unidirectional and bidirectional modes are variables in the scanbox_config file. By default they are both set to the actual number of physical cores in your machine:
sbconfig.phys_cores = uint16(feature('numCores')); % total number of physical cores
sbconfig.cores_uni = sbconfig.phys_cores; % number of cores in unidirectional scanning
sbconfig.cores_bi = sbconfig.phys_cores; % number of cores in bidirectional scanning
A second major change is the addition of more options for magnification, which now default to factors ranging from 1 to 16 in logarithmic steps, 4 steps per octave. Needless to say, be sure to reduce your laser power setting when using magnifications larger than 4.
These settings can be changed in the configuration file by means of two variables:
sbconfig.gain_galvo = logspace(log10(1),log10(16),13); % more options now! sbconfig.gain_resonant = 1.4286 * sbconfig.gain_galvo;
If you want to customize your settings, please follow the instructions here.
The latest release requires the update of the firmware, which you can do by following the second part of the post here.
There are two associated variables, nroi_auto_size and ncolbi that need to be changed so they include entries for all of the magnification settings.
Finally, the PMT gain control panel has been simplified by removing the enable checkbox and zero gain button, as their behavior was causing some confusion. The behavior now is as follows. If the microscope is not scanning the PMT gains are always zero. Only when the microscope is scanning the PMT sliders are enabled and the PMT gains are dictated by their values. Moreover, upon initialization and shutdown Scanbox enforces gains to be zero — as a defensive mechanism.
Note: Please save the latest working version of your Scanbox software so you can go back to it in case you run into any issues with this new distribution. Also, please note that Scanbox no longer supports the 3D mouse. You have to use Knobby from now on. Finally, make sure you install Visual C++ Redistributable 2015 which is required for this update as well.
Scanbox 