[OpenSPIM] Post-meeting recap

[Luke Stuyvenberg]

Hey everyone,

I've just finished meeting with Kevin, and we had quite a bit to discuss about the future of the project. Here's a quick recap:


I'll be graduating in May, but I will be in Madison until approximately the end of July. Between finals and then, I'll be working more or less full-time. To take over for me, Kevin is looking at bringing on a new programmer soon -- hopefully while I and/or Johannes are around to provide a softer introduction to the code base.


We're going to have an existing LOCI student begin work on building the second LOCI OpenSPIM, with the Andor camera in mind. In particular, one idea we had was to increase the height of the optical axis off the breadboard, with two ends in mind: first, to accommodate the Neo's larger camera head size, and two, to take advantage of ThorLabs' available spacers so it is possible to purchase the necessary components if 3D-printing is not available.


We discussed the software priorities, which I believe for the moment boiled down to the Fiji vs. ImageJ, MicroManager vs. OpenSPIM conundrum. Kevin is planning to talk with Johannes to get his opinion on the resolution, but we're also hoping to work more directly with the MM team on either (a) porting MM to Fiji (even if it's a highly stripped-down version), or (b) making the OpenSPIM software vanilla-MM-compatible. Either solution will work to end our distribution of a separate version of Micro-Manager. We also talked about a possible hackathon to decide which combination of these will happen, deciding tentatively on a 3-day hackathon in mid-May.


There were a few questions about the new data taken today; Kevin is curious whether the data could be regarded as 'good' -- and indeed just what 'good' data looks like. We'll talk more about this with Jayne and Julie during the next meeting (3:30 PM on Friday, 4 April) and decide.


Hopefully Kevin can fill in any important details I missed!


Thanks for reading,
Luke Stuyvenberg