[OpenSPIM] Picard stage adapter problem

[Johannes Schindelin]

Hi Aurelia,

On Wed, 18 Sep 2013, Aurelia Honerkamp-Smith wrote:

> I'm running into a problem when I try to configure my 4D stage.  If I
> configure using the January 31 2013 OpenSPIM download, without updating
> through the website first, the Picard stage loads and works normally.
> However once I run the update, the stage can't be found (I get the error
> message, "OpenSPIM Unable to load library: file not accessible or
> corrupted," and it appears as "Picard stage (unavailable)" in the
> hardware configuration wizard list of devices. Has anyone else had this
> problem?  Also, the MicroManager version changes to 1.4.x dev after I
> run the updater; is that as it should be?  I would simply not update,
> except that I need to do so for my camera to be recognized.

Simply not updating will only delay problems, not fix them.

As to the concrete driver problem, I suspect that it is due to us renaming
the OpenSPIM device adapter to PicardStage. You see, the stage is only
part of the OpenSPIM, and we do want to be able to exchange the stage for
another one whenever needed, so the driver was misnamed.

Unfortunately, this invalidates hardware configurations made with the
Jan31 build. You will have to redo the configuration from scratch (or load
it with a Jan31 build, remove the stage from the configuration, save, load
in a current build, and add the new stage).

Sorry for the inconvenience! If I had seen any other way that would not
have caused us a mountain of problems in the future, I would have gone
that way.

> A second question: is there any possibility or plan for the OpenSPIM
> software to be made compatible with Windows 7?  I can't acquire a new
> computer and run XP on it anymore, as our computing department won't
> purchase XP now that it's not supported.  I'm using an older machine
> with XP now, to set up, but I suspect it will be inadequate once I'm
> acquiring real data sets.

Based on feedback from other users, it appears that the OpenSPIM software
should run on Windows 7 just fine, including the camera driver (which was
previously a problem: Hamamatsu's driver had serious problems with Windows
7).

You will just neeed to make sure that you install the newest DCAM driver
from Hamamatsu (I wish they would allow us to ship hardware drivers with
our software; as it is, installation of OpenSPIM is unnecessarily
inconvenient: you have to install the DCAM driver in an extra step after
or before downloading the OpenSPIM software package). But given that the
computer would be new, you would download the newest DCAM driver anyway...

Ciao,
Johannes