Hi everyone,

I've just uploaded a new version of the plugin to the Fiji update site. Some
quick features:

- Rebuilt device interactions to be less dependent on specific
devices/properties/et cetera
- Overhauled asynchronous output to be more reliable and transparent
- Added some rudimentary acquisition profiling, for the curious

As always, I do my best to make sure that the updates are free of any
use-impairing bugs or issues. However, and especially with this update, this
is not always possible. Therefore, if you have any project-critical imaging to
do, please do not update until you have finished.

I mention this because this plugin update completely revises the way OpenSPIM
interacts with Micro-Manager devices, letting us easily add new features and
supported hardware. However, this also means that, for certain features, the
plugin now expects a limited subset of devices, and might cause problems with
others -- in particular, anyone not using the OpenSPIM 1.0 specification on
the site might run into trouble.

On the other hand, if you _don't_ have any project-critical imaging, I would
greatly appreciate it if you could test the plugin on your setup. As I can
personally only test the OpenSPIM 1.0 setup, I don't yet know if the plugin
will operate seamlessly with variants on the setup. If you can, please test
the new plugin and get back to me!

The rest of this e-mail describes the pros, cons, capabilities, and
limitations of the new code, and might only be of interest if the update is
giving you trouble (or if you're just curious about these sorts of things. ;-)
).

Thanks,

Luke Stuyvenberg

-------------------------

The plugin should still work with any hardware compatible with Micro-Manager,
but it will not be able to use any features not provided by the MM API. For
example, it will not be able to determine the maximum position of most stages,
and will be unable to control their velocity, or the laser power of most
lasers. (These will need to be controlled another way, i.e. through the device
property browser in Micro-Manager.)

_What it _can_ do_: The plugin knows the attributes (minimum, maximum, and
step size) of Picard stages, and can control the Z-stage's velocity. It also
knows the minimum and maximum laser power of Coherent Cube laser devices, and
can control that.

_What it _should_ be able to do_: Additionally, it should be able to control
the laser power of Cobolt laser devices (although the range is hard-coded to 0
- 50 mW).

I don't mention cameras because, as yet, the plugin doesn't take advantage of
any camera features not available through the MM API. As a result, it should
be able to use any camera MM can use without batting an eye.

If your hardware is having problems with the update, feel free to e-mail the
list with whatever issues you're running into. You can also add support for
your device yourself: download our development environment from
http://openspim.org/How_to_build_the_software -- from there, take a look at
plugins/SPIMAcquisition/src/main/java/spim/setup/PicardStage.java for an
example of the code the new device manager runs on. I only ask that such
daring individuals as do so eventually submit a pull request on github, or
contact the list with their new code, so we can extend this support to
everyone using the software.