Microfluidic SM Formulator Controller Files

Original Hardware Setup

This is a brief description of the sm ALEX hardware setup.  For additional details on, please see:

Selvin, Paul R. and Ha, Taekjip  "Single-Molecule Techniques: A Laboratory Manual"  Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, 2008.  Available at: < http://cshlpress.com/default.tpl?cart=129229190681590426&action=full&--eqskudatarq=642 >

Program last ran on LabVIEW 7.1, on Windows xp.

This was installed on a Pentium-4 based Dell computer with 512 MB of RAM.

There were two PCI cards of interest:

	National Instruments PCI-6602 Counting Board
		Time Resolution: 12.5nsec

	National Instruments 6711 or 6713 (for EOMs or AOTFs)
		(this needs to be synchronized with the counting board - voltage for the EOM and AOTF - refer to the manufacturer's manual)


The optical setup consisted of two lasers, an acousto-optical tunable filter (AOTF) for laser modulation, an array of lens/filters/dichroics, a microscope body (Olympus IX-71), and two avalanche photodiodes (APDs). 

The setup measures the arrival time of each photon by the counting board that detects the arrival of TTL pulses of each APD detectors with nano-second time resolution. Each photon is assigned to a laser excitation period based on the arrival time of the photon and the internal clock of the PCI board, in which, both the counting board and the laser modulation board needs to be synchronized.