Third-Party Support

MetaMorph

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.

micro-manager

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 at: https://micro-manager.org/wiki/PI_GCS_2

EPICS

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: https://epics.anl.gov/modules/manufacturer.php. 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: https://www.aps.anl.gov/bcda/synApps/motor. The communication is implemented with the modules available in EPICS.

 

ScanImage

ScanImage supports some PI controllers; they are listed at:

http://scanimage.vidriotechnologies.com/display/SI2016/Supported+Microscope+Hardware#SupportedMicroscopeHardware-PiezoHardware (optional).

PI has not developed or tested this implementation.