support for Hamamatsu cameras

[carandraug]

Requested at ELMI 2018.

I'm told that Hamamatsu dCamAPI library supports all of their cameras.

[carandraug]

Requested again, twice, at SPAOM 2019.

[carandraug]

Met with @maazevedo who requested support for an Hamamatsu Orca flash 4.0. I looked into dcam-api who claims to support both Windows and Linux but downloads only shows windows support. I have emailed Hamamatsu about where I can find the Linux builds.

[carandraug]

MesoSPIM (GPLv3) have a ctypes wrapper to dcam-api.

[carandraug]

I have just spoken with James R Brown from Hamamatsu at QBI2020 who offered to lend us their cameras for a few months if we need them to do this.

[juliomateoslangerak]

Had a visit from Hamamatsu representative last week and he mentioned that there will be a Python interface for their cameras very soon.

[carandraug]

@ARCFaria got an Hamamatsu camera is planning on doing this over the next weeks. @kasasxav was also interested to test the use of Microscope as hardware layer for ImSwitch.

[xcasas]

Yes! We use a similar ctypes-wraper to dcam-api which we borrowed from Zhuang Lab / Babcock Lab (MIT license), and then we have an intermediate class Hamamatsu Manager to translate that into the functions we use (crop, getLatestFrame, etc).

I think something similar can be delegated to Python-Microscope and then we can directly fetch it from there. We also have Hamamatsu cameras so we can debug experimentally.

[carandraug]

It took a while but it's now merged. It was only tested on Linux and with software triggers though. Closing.