Thanks for these, all really useful bits of feedback, and many of them things I’d love to fix.
- Cancelling movements is possible with the next generation of Sangaboard firmware (runs on the same Arduino-compatible hardware). Support for this in the Python code will definitely come at some point, and a nice button in the interface will follow. I agree it’s really useful to be able to abort a move before either you have to pull the plug, or you crash the objective into something!
- Estimating and storing max/min positions is possible, but is the sort of thing that goes wrong in annoying ways. It would be good to fix this and perhaps adding endstops would be a solution - this one probably falls into the “yes we’d like to fix it but we’re not quite sure when” category. Software limits that you can manually set is probably the easiest fix, and that’s something that can happen on a more reasonable timescale. Probably one for 3.something rather than the initial v3 though.
- As @WilliamW says, we can already calibrate X/Y steps to pixels. Estimating the size of steps is possible, as is measuring the magnification. I’m slightly nervous about using calibration factors that aren’t verified by a measurement though; we’d need to think through carefully how we make it clear what the provenance of any reported distances is. That’s particularly an issue for any future medical usage, because there are whole sets of considerations that apply to anything that can produce numerical measurements.
- Projecting a scale bar ought to be possible, if you’ve got a calibration artifact. It can be estimated even if you’ve not, but again it would be sensible to be very clear what calibration (or estimate) has been used.
- There’s an extension to record video, it’s basic but should work. Recording the video stream on the client side is a very good option, especially if your client is a more powerful computer than the embedded Pi!
- I would love to swap the built-in gallery for a more fully featured solution; I think Joel was very aware of its limitations when he put it together, and I think it would be a bad use of our resources to put too much more work into writing something that already exists elsewhere. Anyone who wants to help integrating a gallery solution would be very welcome…
- the latest version of v7, which we hope will become the first beta, features a hard stop for the objective holder, so there is now no ambiguity on where to put it. I will be curious to see if this is useful consistency, or if it removes adjustability that was helpful.
- Version selection for the documentation is something I’d like, again it’s just a matter of finding the dev time to do it
