Third-Party Support

The driver integrated into MetaMorph is maintained by Molecular Devices themselves and is part of the official MetaMorph distribution. The code is superimposed onto the existing PI software. All PI controllers which are supported by the PI GCS2 DLL and can be connected using USB or RS-232 are, therefore, also supported. XY (sample) as well as Z (focus) drives are supported.

PI has developed a device adapter which is part of the official version of micro-manager. The user, therefore, does not need separate modules from the PI product CD but gets it all integrated into micro-manager on delivery.

All PI controllers which can read GCS2 are supported.

The stages can be combined arbitrarily and are supported as "Z stage" (focus) as well as "XY stage" (sample). Any number of stages can be connected; only the active Z drive or XY stage, however, is selected in the user interface.

Further information available here:

PI GCS 2 - Micro-Manager

For EPICS, PI offers its own PI GCS2 driver which is continuously developed and is part of the official EPICS distribution. The list of officially supported PI devices is available at:

EPICS Hardware Support: by Manufacturer

If a controller is not in this list, it does not automatically mean that it is not supported. In this case, our PI sales engineers can offer advice and support.

The EPICS "motor" interface is supported; its documentation is available at:

EPICS: Motor Record and Device/Driver support

The communication is implemented with the modules available in EPICS.

ScanImage supports some PI controllers; they are listed at:

ScanImage Supported Microscope Hardware

(optional)

PI has not developed or tested this implementation.

PI does not offer its own driver for Tango, but for many PI controllers Tango supports already exist. Where this is not the case, PI gladly supports its customers with the implementation.

Tango Device Server User's Guide

More information about TANGO

The Robot Operating System (ROS) is a flexible framework for developing software for robotics. It is a set of tools, software libraries, and rules that help you build and control complex robot applications.

For support, PI offers a ROS driver with which PI hexapods can be integrated into a ROS environment. The PI hexapods can comfortably be controlled with it by using the well known mechanisms from ROS. ROS additionally offers the possibility to visualize and simulate the application. For certain hexapods, models exist that are automatically available when the ROS driver is downloaded.

The download is available on the ROS website:

ROS.org