mesoSPIM_waveforms
The control signals for the galvo scanners and tunable lenses are generated by a National Instruments (NI) PXI-6259 card housed in a NI PXIe-1073 chassis connected to the imagingcomputer by a MXI-bus. An additional PXI-6733 card controls the laser intensities (up to 8lines) via the analog inputs of the laser engines. All waveforms are generated by the mesoSPIM-control software (see corresponding Supplementary note), buffered in advance and triggered by a master trigger routed to all NI cards. The camera is triggered via a counter output on the PXI-6259.
Timing diagram of the mesoSPIM waveforms: The camera trigger starts the rolling shutter, which is synchronized to a sweep of the tunable lenses. At the same time, the light-sheet is created by rapidly scanning a Gaussian beam using the galvo scanners. While the exposure is running, the laser is set to a constant intensity and switched off between frames. During the same interval, the camera frame is read out and the z-stage can advance.