Microscope hardware control is mainly performed through a National Instruments data acquisition (NI-DAQ) acquisition board (
PCIe-6353, National Instruments). Hardware is controlled using microscope control software ImSwitch
19 (link) written in Python. Control of the etSTED method is performed using a custom-written widget and controller in ImSwitch, available at GitHub (
https://github.com/kasasxav/ImSwitch and
https://github.com/jonatanalvelid/ImSwitch-etSTED), which controls lasers, image acquisition, and runs real-time analysis pipelines with customizable parameters. Instructions on how to run etSTED imaging can be found in the GitHub repository of the standalone widget (
https://github.com/jonatanalvelid/etSTED-widget), while instructions on how to run ImSwitch can be found in the repository on GitHub and corresponding documentation (
https://imswitch.readthedocs.io).
A focus lock controlled with ImSwitch combining an infrared laser (
CP980S, Thorlabs), a CMOS camera (
DMK 33UP1300, The Imaging Source) and the
z-piezostage through a feedback loop, as previously described
5 (link), is used. It enables experiments to run stably for time periods longer than hours.
The microscope control computer contains a Ryzen 7 3700X CPU (AMD) and a GeForce RTX 3060 Ti GPU (ASUS).
Alvelid J., Damenti M., Sgattoni C, & Testa I. (2022). Event-triggered STED imaging. Nature Methods, 19(10), 1268-1275.