Neuroscience Notes November 2017

By 23rd November 2017Presidents Log

Nowadays November for Cairn means Neuroscience, which is in Washington DC again this year, so this is where Jez Danielle and Martin currently find themselves. Or at least Jez and Danielle currently do. Martin on the other hands seems to be completely lost, sobbing uncontrollably because so few of the products he has had anything to do with are being shown on the Chroma/89North stand, where we are currently guesting in their capacity as our North American distributors. Sorry Martin, but there are quite a lot of other people designing things within the Company now!

We’ll try to comfort further him in a minute, but like it or not, the main Cairn product of interest here is the Mizar lightsheet system, which Cairn has commercialised from a design from Paul Maddox at the University of South Carolina. To save Martin further pain, please instead read here for further product details, but basically it’s a “microscale” lightsheet system intended for use with objectives of relatively high NA and magnification. And for “larger scale” lightsheets, suitable for rather bigger samples of up to a few mm or so, we are also showing our very nice L-SPI system, of which you can read more here.

Our new FuraLED system, which is at least based on Martin’s electronics, is here, but amongst his other loves, of the image splitters and filterwheels there is no sign!!! He so wanted to bore people about the latest Optospin developments, giving a significantly more frequent stepping rate, but without a demonstration it’s just not the same. Similarly, there is no sign of the new “bypass” version of our Optosplit image splitter, and which makes it correspondingly more difficult to tell people of all the developments there, including the imminent arrival of the commercial version of our Multisplit fourway splitter. This also made it more difficult to offload our naive literature attempts to inject a little humour into our image splitter marketing, to which we are instead reduced to promoting here.

Other Cairn products on show include the TriLine version of our laserbank system, our TwinCam and our OptoTIRF products. Our engineer Tom has done some particularly nice work to come up with that last product. But 89North have something very special of their own, in the form of their multiwavelength laser diode illuminator, the very appropriately named LDI. We expect to sell quite a lot of these between ourselves! And some of these laser diodes are going to find themselves driven by our own electronics (Martin has just perked up a bit) within our Laserbank system, to give intensity control over a good three orders of magnitude – potentially very useful when you may be delivering a watt of photons when at full power!

But now it’s time for us to power down and do some socialising. It’s a tough life at Cairn!

 

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