Set up the Camera
We start construction of the microscope by installing the camera software and making sure that it works correctly.
The camera used in this course is a Flir Grasshopper GS3-U3-51S5M-C. It is one of several small form factor cameras that are often referred to as industrial CMOS cameras in the literature. Industrial CMOS cameras are relatively cheap and compatible with fluorescence microscopes, but their noise characteristics and sensitivities are worse than more expensive scientific CMOS, or sCMOS, cameras. While most of our research is done with sCMOS camers, industrial CMOS cameras are still sufficient for applications in basic fluorescence microscopy.
Install the Drivers and Capture Software
To begin, we will install Flir's Spinnaker software that includes the necessary camera drivers and the SpinView capture software. For reasons that will become apparent in a later section, you must install version 2.3.0.77.
Navigate to https://www.teledynevisionsolutions.com/products/spinnaker-sdk in your web browser and select the Download button. Product software pages change frequently, so if the page has changed since this was written, you will need to search for the Spinnaker SDK (software developer kit) and find it on your own.
You will be asked to create an account or sign in after clicking the Download button. Go ahead and do so.
Once logged in, you will see a page that looks like the following. Be sure to select the link for previous versions!
Download the Windows version 2.3.0.77 installer. Unzip the file, and launch the installation with the x64 version of the installer1. When prompted, select Applicaton development, though Camera evaluation should work as well. There is no need to install the GigE camera driver2. Any other settings may be left with their default values.
Acquire an Image
After installation has finished, attach the camera to the PC with the blue USB cable and start the SpinView software.