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MicroFPGA: an affordable FPGA platform for microscope control

View ORCID ProfileJoran Deschamps, Christian Kieser, View ORCID ProfilePhilipp Hoess, View ORCID ProfileTakahiro Deguchi, View ORCID ProfileJonas Ries
doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.07.495178
Joran Deschamps
1Cell Biology and Biophysics, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
2Computational Biology Center, Fondazione Human Technopole, Milan, Italy
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  • For correspondence: joran.deschamps@fht.org
Christian Kieser
3Electronic Workshop, European Molecular Biology Laboratory, Heidelberg, Germany
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Philipp Hoess
2Computational Biology Center, Fondazione Human Technopole, Milan, Italy
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Takahiro Deguchi
2Computational Biology Center, Fondazione Human Technopole, Milan, Italy
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Jonas Ries
2Computational Biology Center, Fondazione Human Technopole, Milan, Italy
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Abstract

Modern microscopy relies increasingly on microscope automation to improve throughput, ensure reproducibility or observe rare events. Automation requires in particular computer control of the important elements of the microscope. Furthermore, optical elements that are usually fixed or manually movable can be placed on electronically-controllable elements. In most cases, a central electronics board is necessary to generate the control signals they require and to communicate with the computer. Fur such tasks, Arduino microcontrollers are widely used due to their low cost and programming entry barrier. However, they are limiting in their performance for applications that require high-speed or multiple parallel processes. Field programmable gate arrays (FPGA) are the perfect technology for high-speed microscope control, as they are capable of processing signals in parallel and with high temporal precision. While plummeting price made the technology available to consumers, a major hurdle remains the complex languages used to configure them. In this work, we used an affordable FPGA, delivered with an open-source and friendly-to-use programming language, to create a versatile microscope control platform called MicroFPGA. It is capable of synchronously triggering cameras and multiple lasers following complex patterns, as well as generating various signals used to control microscope elements such as filter wheels, servomotor stages, flip-mirrors, laser power or acoustooptic modulators. MicroFPGA is open-source and we provide online Micro-Manager, Java, Python and LabVIEW libraries, together with blueprints and tutorials.

Competing Interest Statement

The authors have declared no competing interest.

Footnotes

  • https://mufpga.github.io/

  • https://github.com/mufpga

Copyright 
The copyright holder for this preprint is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under a CC-BY 4.0 International license.
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Posted June 09, 2022.
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MicroFPGA: an affordable FPGA platform for microscope control
Joran Deschamps, Christian Kieser, Philipp Hoess, Takahiro Deguchi, Jonas Ries
bioRxiv 2022.06.07.495178; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.07.495178
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MicroFPGA: an affordable FPGA platform for microscope control
Joran Deschamps, Christian Kieser, Philipp Hoess, Takahiro Deguchi, Jonas Ries
bioRxiv 2022.06.07.495178; doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2022.06.07.495178

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