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Miniscope Python module

This package provides Python bindings for libminiscope, the Miniscope data acquisition library of PoMiDAQ. It allows connecting to UCLA Miniscope V3/V4 and Siminiscope devices via their DAQ box, controlling excitation, gain, focus (EWL) and other settings, receiving frames as NumPy arrays and recording lossless video together with timestamps and BNO orientation data.

The module has so far only been tested on Linux.

Dependencies

The bindings are compiled from C++ and link against system libraries, which must be present (including development headers) when building:

  • A C++23 capable compiler (GCC >= 14, Clang >= 17)
  • CMake (>= 3.18) and Ninja
  • OpenCV (>= 4.8)
  • FFmpeg (>= 6.1, libavcodec, libavformat, libavutil, libswscale)
  • nlohmann-json (>= 3.10)

On Debian-based systems:

sudo apt install build-essential cmake ninja-build libopencv-dev \
                 libavcodec-dev libavformat-dev libswscale-dev nlohmann-json3-dev \
                 python3-dev python3-pip

pybind11 and NumPy are fetched automatically as build requirements.

Installation

Install directly from a source checkout:

pip install .

Or build a wheel and a source distribution:

python3 -m build

The resulting files are placed in the dist/ directory. The wheel links libminiscope statically, but still depends on the OpenCV and FFmpeg shared libraries of the system it was built on. To distribute it to other machines, run it through auditwheel (Linux) to bundle these libraries.

The module can also be built and installed as part of a regular CMake build of PoMiDAQ by enabling the PYTHON option.

Usage

from miniscope import Miniscope

mscope = Miniscope()
mscope.load_device_config('Miniscope_V4')
mscope.set_cam_id(0)

mscope.connect()
mscope.run()
mscope.set_control_value('led0', 20)

mscope.start_recording('/tmp/miniscope-test.mkv')
while mscope.is_running:
    frame = mscope.current_disp_frame  # NumPy array or None
    ...
mscope.stop()
mscope.disconnect()

Operations that can fail (load_device_config, connect, run, start_recording, hard_reset) raise a RuntimeError with a descriptive message. Errors that stop a running acquisition are available via the last_error property.

A complete example can be found in python/example.py in the PoMiDAQ repository.

License

LGPL-3.0-or-later