Hello!
I’m very happy to report that I’ve printed my delta stage microscope, have assembled it along with assembling an adafruit dotstar LED 8x8. I’ve followed the instructions as per the “LED grid illumination extension” gitlab repository and have been able to launch the webclient with the extensions showing up in the interface but they remain non-functional - I just cannot get the LED grid to light up!
I have checked my wiring, and tested for continuity (power/data - using a (74AHCT125 shifter)) and everything looks good! I plan to use the microscope for phase contrast wet mounts in biological applications. Because of this, I’ve opted to solder a 1000uF cap to handle the possible power demands for using the array under higher power (as per the adafruit website) as well as externally powering it from a 5V/2.4A PSU (tested and outputting as indicated) (should be enough to run the LEDs at 50% brightness). After ruling out hardware I began to pick at the software.
This is where I fall short, as I have little experience with Linux systems. I did however, give it a go. It seems from the webclient logs (see below), that there is a problem with the something along the lines of a “LTX_MANIFEST” - my knowledge of python is quite limited. I did have a look at the OpenFlexure extensions documentation but haven’t really been able to figure it out. It did appear that it required, a “Labthings” package which I’ve added, along with some of the adafruit.circuitpython.dotstar packages requiring an earlier version which I’ve since rolled back. However, this is now the log from the most recent startup.
The part that mystifies me is the,
“[WARNING] Module type “Illumination” not recognised.”
and,
[2025-04-19 20:25:01,672] [MainThread] [WARNING] No LTX_MANIFEST found for /var/openflexure/extensions/microscope_extensions/grid_illumination/init.py. Searching for implicit extension objects.
[2025-04-19 20:25:01,684] [MainThread] [WARNING] No LTX_MANIFEST found for /var/openflexure/extensions/microscope_extensions/phase_contrast/init.py. Searching for implicit extension objects.
I’ve played around with the grid_illumination init.py files by rearranging how it retrieves the extensions to no avail and so have reverted it back to the default (provided one). I had also created a labthings.json in the grid_illumination folder which broke the webclient (as I had no idea what I was doing) so I had reverted that too.
I figured it was time to ask the experts! =)
Let me know what you all make of this and thank you for taking the time to have a look. 
Cheers,
Sid.
4 posts - 2 participants