New Andor Driver Software Version

[mattketk]

We were able to receive the updated software to control the Andor software (updated just a few months ago too.)

Installation Instructions

Installing drivers

1. Ensure that Andor is powered up and that I/O hardware is hooked up to computer
2. Ensure that libusb-dev package is installed
3. Unzip tar.gz file given for Andor software
4. Enter the unzipped folder, issue sudo bash install_andor
5. When prompted to read the release notes, answer no.

Installing examples

1. Locate the examples/console folder in the Andor software package
2. Inside examples/console, go into one of the folders to run an example (recommended: generic, image)
3. In any one of the folders, issue make command (make sure g++ is installed as well)
4. To run the example code, issue ./generic if in the generic example, ./image if in the image example, so on, so forth.

What's Next

Writing an interface for the C++ code to be used in Python (the current 'swig' setup only works for the previous version of the Andor driver.)

• peering into examples given in the software download to see how Andor is initialized and controlled in the C++ code
• Points of interest include: Initialize("/usr/local/etc/Andor") function, getting/setting cooling, taking an image

Deciding the new Python-C++ interface

• @ojf will contact some people to see what they might recommend in approaching this project.

[ojf]

Conor recommends creating a C++/Python interface with pybind instead of swig--so lets give that a try before trying swig again.