I have built the entire microscope.
I have finally received my Raspberry Pi (months on back order).
I have set it up with the Raspberry Pi OS, and it works great.
I now click on “Install the software” only to discover that I cannot use the usual Raspberry PI OS. And worse, the 8 Gigabyte Pi model is not supported.
I was excited about this project because I would be able (I thought) to use the Pi for other interesting projects when not using it for the microscope. In fact I printed a holder for the Pi so that it would be easy to use it for other things when I wanted to.
Is there any way that I can download just the software required for the microscope, and use it with my 8 Gig model 4B Raspberry Pi and the standard Raspberry Pi OS?
Someone may provide a better answer than me (I just started), but since you can’t install their OS (EDIT: may be possible to install it, check comments below mine), it seems like you’ll have to use libcamera for now. I don’t have a 2nd SD card for my Zero 2 so I’m using Libcamera to take pics: Raspberry Pi Documentation - Camera.
Without the Openflexure’s color compensation the colors will be screwy, but you can compensate slightly by using different color tuning profiles. The imx219_noir.json one will reduce pinkness. Raspberry Pi Documentation - Camera.
The Openflexure distribution of the Raspbian OS is a full OS that will be able to do basically all of the things that the standard Raspberry Pi OS can. The Openflexure server has many specific dependencies, and the simplest way to make sure that you have everything is to distribute the complete OS image containing all of the microscope software.
Note that you should upgrade ofm software to the latest version as soon as you have installed it, there are many improvements in version 2.10 that are not in the version 2.9.3 on the current SD image (dated 2021-06-17)
sudo ofm update
sudo ofm upgrade
Unfortunately the microscope server cannot run on the newest version of the Raspberry PI OS as they have changed the underlying camera interface software.
As @Heartyhar says, the simplest way to use your Pi as both a dedicated microscope and as a normal Pi is to have two SD cards. Just make sure that the Pi is properly shut down and powered down before removing or inserting an SD card.
Edit: I believe the 8GB Pi will actually work fine with the current Openflexure SD image. I think it did not with an earlier version.
Sorry to reply to an old thread, but just for completeness - the “incompatibility” is that if you run a 32-bit OS on a 64-bit Pi, you lose half the RAM; it effectively becomes a 4Gb, 32-bit computer instead. So I think it will all work fine, you just won’t get the benefit of your more powerful computer. If that is the case (I don’t have an 8Gb Pi to test with) please do reply and let us know - it would be good to have a confirmed report so I can update the website.
Also, there’s now an updated SD image with the latest software on it, and hopefully I’ll be keeping it a bit more up to date from now on.
Hi @TTN, nobody has reported here, but in the post I linked to in post 5 on this thread @pristinscope says that it did work for them.
Note that @r.w.bowman says you may not be able to use more than 4GB of the 8GB RAM, but if you cannot get any other versions of the Pi then the alternative is no RAM and no processor
