micro-manager Support

100X Imaging India is offering technical support for the Free and Open-Source Software micro-manager

1. Why do I need technical support for micro-manager?

Configuration of high-end research grade microscopes and associated hardware (shutters, filterwheels, cameras etc.) can be a complex and daunting task. If you choose to use micro-manager to control your imaging system you have taken the first step to making your operation easy. 100X Imaging can offer you personalized technical support to get your system up and running in no time and make sure it is configured optimally for your experiments. This is similar to companies such as RedHat, Ubuntu that offer support for the Free and Open-Source Linux OS.

2. What kind of support do we offer?

There are three levels of support: basic, enhanced and institutional.

Basic support: This is an individual license for 1 microscope system and provides microscope system configuration, troubleshooting and bug fixes. This allows you to get your system up-and-running on micro-manager and start your experiments quickly. The initial support package buys you support for 2 years.

Enhanced support: Provides all the above services along with custom application development. For instance you might need a custom script for your specific imaging application, or a processing routine for image analysis. 100X Imaging will be happy to develop this for you either with a Beanshell script, Matlab routine or a Python wrap-around. Talk to us and we will work with you.

Institutional support: We recognize that in contrast to the US or EU, biological microscopy in India is at a nascent stage. (For instance the University of California research system with 10 campuses has a larger number of microscope systems than all of India ). Therefore as an option we offer institutional support for micro-manager. Such an institutional support license is ideal for new institutes or for established institutes who are upgrading their core facilities.

The institutional license would provide micro-manager support for all wide-field and spinning disc microscopes on your campus and will convert the entire institute to 1 imaging platform. Apart from providing huge cost savings, Open-Source licensing of the software will enable unrestricted modifications to the code to suit particular experiments. Contributions to extend the function and provide device support can be made by various parties, both within the institute (students and faculty) and outside it. Institute researchers can also access the larger community of micro-manager users some of them with similar imaging modes. The institute also benefits from adopting one image standard across campus facilitating learning and collaboration.

In addition to microscope configuration and setup we will provide you pre-purchase assistance for specifying your microscope system, software fixes and training in micro-manager and ImageJ through our 2-day basic microscopy course. At present, the National Centre for Biological Sciences has an institutional license and micro-manager serves as the microscope control platform in many laboratories.