ScanImage 2019 : ScanImage 3.x upgrade guide

Created by Lawrence Niu on May 07, 2019

Hardware

ScanImage supports scanning with a pair of galvanometric mirrors as well as scanning with a resonant / galvo mirror pair. The ScanImage module 'LinScan' for scanning with a pair galvanometric mirrors was carefully designed to be backward compatible with legacy National Instruments DAQ hardware typically used with ScanImage 3.x.

The following boards can be reused:

SupportedNI DAQComment
(tick)PCI-6110(Optional) combine with one multifunction NI X-series board for advanced triggering ('Aux board')
(tick)PCI-6111(Optional) combine with one multifunction NI X-series board for advanced triggering ('Aux board')
(tick)PCI-6132

requires one multifunction NI X-series board for galvo control and advanced triggering ('Aux board')

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For new setups, simultaneously sampled NI X-series boards are recommended (e.g. NI-6356).

ScanImage LinScan uses three logical devices: The fast digitizer ('Acq board'), the galvo control ('Galvo board') and the trigger control ('Aux board'). These logical devices can be mapped to different DAQ boards, or multiple logical devices can be mapped to the same DAQ board. If the Aux board is a separate device, other functionality such as Pockels control can be mapped onto this device as well.

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If the logical devices are mapped to different physical devices, they need to be connected by a trigger bus. This can be either a RTSI bus cable or the backplane of a PXI chassis.

If you connect PCI-611x board with one or multiple X-series boards (PCIe-63xx), make sure to use the 'Extended Length RTSI Bus Cables' to bridge the gap between the long and short boards (RTSI Bus Cable, Product Number 777562-05)

To learn more about wiring ScanImage, review the LinScan documentation page.

Software

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ScanImage 3.8 requires Matalb 2013b, while later versions of ScanImage require newer versions of Matlab (see ScanImage Version Compatibility). Usually, multiple versions of Matlab can be installed, activated and run independently on the same machine without requiring an additional license. Each version of Matlab can be configured for a specific ScanImage versions and thus providing a clear separation between the different versions of ScanImage.

In contrast, only one version of the NI-DAQmx driver can be installed on the same machine. If both ScanImage 3.8 and a later version of ScanImage are installed on the same machine, NI-DAQmx version 9.8 is recommended for backwards compatibility.