Measuring laser intensity underwater in a sample chamber with an open-hardware solution
By using off-the-shelf components and the readily available and easy to use Arduino systems, we have created a power meter than can be used to provide an idea of light intensity at the sample’s position and under identical conditions. Use of such a tool could help unify reporting of laser parameters and light intensity in the field.
Here we present step-by-step instructions on how to build the device,
provide details of the codes used and example results from our own
light sheet microscope. This design was based on [2].
[1] Laissue, P., Alghamdi, R., Tomancak, P. et al. Assessing phototoxicity in live fluorescence imaging. Nat Methods 14, 657–661 (2017) doi:10.1038/nmeth.4344
[2] Dormann D.. IntensityCheck – The light measuring app for microscope performance checks and consistent fluorescence imaging. PLOS ONE 14(3): e0214659 (2019).
doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0214659
Presented at The Light Sheet Fluorescence Microscopy 2019, Frankfurt am Main (https://www.lsfm2019.eu/).