If you have been making use of Knobby’s spatial calibration button, you can now move on to interacting with Knobby remotely.

The new Knobby scheduler panel looks a bit expanded.  The speed (coarse/fine/super-fine), the mode (normal/rotate), and zero (XYZ/XYZA) buttons should be self explanatory. They do exactly the same as if you were to be using them on Knobby.  The action you select on the panel will be reflected on Knobby’s screen as well.

The range, steps and frames entries provide a quick way to edit the scheduler’s table if you intend to do a simple z-stack.  Range is the extent of the distance in z you want to span, steps is the the size of the step (in um), and frames is the number of frames you want to scan at each position.

Finally, there is new checkbox labeled “Mouse control”. When this is active and you are scanning you can easily move around the sample by clicking the cell you want to bring to the center of the screen, as shown by the video example above.  Once you click on a cell, Knobby does the rest. We call this feature click-and-center. This works at all magnifications (even if you change it on the fly). At the same time, scrolling the mouse wheel allows you to focus up and down.  The speed of the movement will be controlled by the selected speed. You may want to start at the slowest speed (Super-fine).