Designing a virtual instrument to drive Thor labs 2-axis galvo mirror

[JHC423]

I am relatively new to LabView, and am looking to design a program to drive a 2-axis galvo mirror from ThorLabs, it is a GVS-012. Both mirrors are wired to BNC analogue output connectors on a NI USB-6343 DAQ card. I am attempting to use the mirrors to create a bidirectional scan in order to create an intensity plot where I can find the points of maximum intensity and then be able to set the mirrors to that fixed point to do further analysis. I have gone through the documentation from ThorLabs, but there is very little information on how to integrate the system into LabView. My current code is designed using the NIDAQmx API along with a waveform signal generator. Is there a better way to design such a system in LabView?

[santo_13]

Have you looked through the several other ThorLabs and galvo mirror topics on this forum?

[Mrx042002]

Hey i am also trying to do same thing.

Could you please help me about how you did it?

[JHC423]

Hi, we were able to get our system running using a pre made program called GPScan. I am including a link to the documentation for this program. It is pretty straightforward to use once you tweak the parameters for the output voltages. Unfortunately we didn’t get to build an entire system using the program because the PI left the school. Wishing you best of luck getting your system up and running.

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0010465515001095

[Mrx042002]

Thank you, Mr. JHC423.

What DAQ did you use and connection cables?

[JHC423]

We used a NI USB-6343 DAQ card. In retrospect, this card was a little overkill, but the mirrors were hooked into the card using BNC connectors that terminated to alligator clips and was wired to the harness that Thorlabs sent with the galvo system. Just make sure to hook the X mirror to the lower numbered Daq port to make running the program easier. 

[Mrx042002]

Thank you .

can we connect by email?

[Mrx042002]

Dear Mr.JHC423,

Could you please tell why the DAQ NI USB-6343 DAQ you used you are referring to as overkill?
Is any better DAQ available? We have some cost constraints for DAQ

[JHC423]

Everything depends on the setup you are aiming for. For us, we were building a single molecule 2D-FLCS microscope that utilized detectors from PicoQuant and a white light pulsed laser from NKT Photonics. Because of this, the only thing we needed the daq card for was to drive the mirrors since PicoQuant and NKT Photonics had their own suite of software to run the detectors as well as the laser. The daq card we had ordered was in the BNC configuration instead of the screw terminals which made hooking up the galvo mirrors more complicated. This required a connecter like the one in this link: 

https://www.digikey.com/en/products/detail/pomona-electronics/3957/736731?gclsrc=aw.ds&utm_adgroup=&...  

The DAQ card we used was around $3500 which was one of the cheaper cards from NI. I say it was a little overkill because we only needed 2 of the connectors and the card itself had much more than we needed for our use case. Virtually any of the daq cards that NI sells will meet the minimum requirement for the thorlabs galvo system, for us we used a GVS012 galvo system from thorlabs. One thing that we noticed was that you have to make sure the power supply to the mirrors is set to the proper setting. Our PI ordered the wrong power supply and as a result the mirrors would not hold steady. another issue we ran into is that the BNC connectors were only setup for 2 wire configuration so we had to rig the ground cables coming from the galvo control boards to touch the outer connector of the BNC in order to properly ground the mirrors to avoid damage. 

[IMM223]

By chance is this for the king research group at UNM