Software control of a Nikon Ti Z-drive

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Antony Lee Antony Lee
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Software control of a Nikon Ti Z-drive

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Dear all,

I would like to control the Z-drive of a Nikon Ti microscope (without PFS)
from a home-written program.  (The program is in Python, but I don't mind
using other languages if necessary.)  I have found and tried using various
solutions: directly controlling the (undocumented?) Nikon.TiScope.NikonTi
COM object via pywin32, or controlling the Z-drive via Micro-Manager and
pymmcore or pycro-manager.  In all cases I have found that the control is
rather brittle: requests for position change
(`MoveRelative()`/`MoveAbsolute()` on the COM object, or `setPosition()` on
MMCore) only sometimes result in actual physical motion; even when it does,
the position reported back (`Position()` on the COM object, or
`getPosition()` on MMCore) often fails to correctly update (and in any case
never includes the "custom" z-offset set on the microscope, although that's
a much less important issue that can be worked around); and, on top of
that, the whole process crashes with Windows access violations every so
often.

Are these problems that others here have seen before?  Does anyone have a
solution for more robust control of the Nikon Ti Z-drive?

Thanks in advance,

Antony
samjlord samjlord
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Re: Software control of a Nikon Ti Z-drive

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I use Micro-Manager.
https://micro-manager.org/wiki/NikonTI

Sam