mio does not "see" miniscope

[raqueladaia]

Hi all,

I'm setting up a Python protocol with mio to automaticallly and sequentially activate four UCLA miniscopes over a 24‑h cycle.

Maybe I am missing something very trivial but mio does not detect the miniscope connected to the PC despite the miniscope appears in device manager, it is appropriately recognized and operated by the software "Miniscope-DAQ-QT-Software" and Power Shell finds the miniscope.

Any time I try to run this bit of script:

Camera.capture(source='fpga', show_video=True)
time.sleep(1)

I get the error:

Mio.exceptions.DeviceOpenError: Cannot open device: (the error is -1: OpalKelly module does not "see" the miniscope.)

I think the bitstream I feed is the correct one (XEM7310-A75/USBInterface-8_33mhz-J2_2-3v3-IEEE.bit), so this should not be the problem either. But can it be I am using the wrong device Id in the config yaml file? How does a correct device Id look like?

These are the things I have tried and have not worked:

• Changed DAQ boxes
• Changed USB ports
• Changed USB cables
• Had the miniscope under "Universal Serial Bus controllers"
• Had the miniscope under "Cameras"
• Put jumpers in K1 and K3
• Use different bitstreams
• Added the okFrontPanel (from mio.vendor.opalkelly.win) to PATH
• Moved mio.vendor.opalkelly.win folder to Lib of my virtual environment
• Tried the Opal Kelly functions within mio.vendor.opalkelly.win

• dev = ok.okCFronPanel()
• rec = dev.OpenBySerial("") --> rec = -1

I would appreciate very much any little advice or guidance. I don't know what else to try.

Thanks!

[sneakers-the-rat]

aha yes, so this software is currently in internal alpha development with a different set of miniscopes. we have not yet backported handling v4 or other miniscopes currently handled by the Qt DAQ. These current miniscopes use an FPGA to decode wirelessly transmitted data, so don't use the v4 USB daq box.

if i'm not mistaken, if you want to use the v4 programmatically, it should just appear as a normal webcam device with e.g. opencv - that's how the Qt DAQ works under the hood. so for now you might try to do something like

import cv2

# not sure what the actual device index will be on your system, 
# so will need some empirical testing what this value should be
device_idx = 0
scope = cv2.VideoCapture(device_idx)

# use opencv videocapture object normally...

the only special thing there is that we use some of the opencv config registers in a nonstandard way to e.g. control the EWL. I can't really tell which is which, but the cap props i see being set specially are CAP_PROP_CONTRAST, CAP_PROP_GAMMA and CAP_PROP_SHARPNESS https://github.com/Aharoni-Lab/Miniscope-DAQ-QT-Software/blob/0fecb97cca82c694b1b40dde03cd759e23ad3224/source/videostreamocv.cpp#L414-L416 , maybe @daharoni remembers which opencv props are used to control which miniscope props

[raqueladaia]

Hi, thanks for your answer! when I read Generic I/O interfaces for miniscopes, I thought it would work with any miniscope.
Thanks for pointing into the right direction!

[sneakers-the-rat]

We are working towards that, yes, just not quite done :)