I saw an ebay link for 4 cameras pulled from a HiSeq 2000. I am interested in using the cameras to build a digital microscope, but I'm not sure how easy it would be to interface the cameras to a PC, or if they need optics to work. Any ideas? Here is the link: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4-Illumina-HiSeq-2000-Hamamatsu-S10...

This is very cool. I hope you get some cool uses out of this.

What's the max frame rate you can get out of the cameras (without tiling)? Are you able to control focus and camera gain?

Thanks, working out the max frame rate is a bit complicated by the fact it uses time delay integration (TDI) scanning. There are 4 TDI cameras each 2048 * 128 pixels. I couldn't find any official documentation (the cameras are Hamamatsu S10405 CCDs and there is one C10000-509 control board for 2 cameras each). I think it's the same sensor as this camera which quotes the line rate at 50khz. https://www.hamamatsu.com/resources/pdf/sys/SCAS0085E_C10000...

This Ebay listing quotes the line rate as 1khz, not sure where they got that: https://www.ebay.com/itm/4-Illumina-HiSeq-2000-Hamamatsu-S10...

We were able to grab a live video feed from a single camera, that must have been 20fps at least, but we'll have to investigate fully.

Yes, we are able adjust the gain and are able to focus both by moving the stage and by adjusting the more fine-grained piezo focus actuator (but we'd like to be able auto-focus using Micro Manager: https://micro-manager.org).

Nice. I suspect there are quite a few Illumina engineers secretly cheering for you.

I'm in touch with a community of microscopy folks which includes the maintainers of Micro Manager. I'll send this link around, I bet they'll be interested.