The Pulsar Engineering Community Board

Hello everyone,

I am building a linear scanning raman system based on the open raman platform (breadboard edition), where the sample is moved in between each measurement. This would also be suitable for an automatisation of raman sampling where a robot swap sample after each acquisition.

We previously discussed activating the capture via gpio from the camera, this was not practical, however a simple arduino keyboard emulator can send a f5 command and trigger acquisition this way.
It work great!
I am now wondering if it would be possible to activate the gpio in output, exposure active mode?
This would be useful as I could set the controller to wait for the end of the exposure to trigger a mouvement of the sample and a new acquisition.
This way the exposure length wouldn't need to be synchronized in between the software and the microcontroller in charge of moving the sample.
I had a look through the open source code to no avail.
Is anyone familiar with the code could tell me if this is feasible and how to proceed?

Before writing any code you could prototype the system using the camera manufacturer software to record batches of images (using the triggering to delay acquisition) and use our Matlab script to convert the images into spectra (or spectral cube/image).

That's the *lean* way of doing it's the best approach I can recommend!

Hi Luc,

I did consider this already, I am sure it would work.
However I need to make my system idiot proof if possible, the simpler the better as it is part of a bigger system which might be used by non scientist.
The spectrum analyser software look like a nice platform for this.
An other option is to have a timer on the machine side to dial in the exposure length (including multiple exposure averaging). this would also work and be fairly straight forward.
But if it is at ll possible It would be great to have this functionality activated by default, as I doubt it would interfere with any of the other process.
I am not a programer, so my understanding of c++ is very limited, but I imagine a command is send to erase previous configuration and then a new one is uploaded right?
could you pinpoint where it happen or at the very least on which script it happen?
Perhaps I can try my luck at editing it or at least get some insight on to this interface.

I'd say you need to turn the single acquisition button into a toggle button (like the live view button) and run the acquisition in loop as long as the button is pressed.

The camera bridge library must also be modified to change the software trigger to external trigger.

Beware to stop the acquisition before you run out of trigger pulses or the program will stay stuck waiting indefinitely for an acquisition!