During the course of our research in optical tweezers, we have developed an extensive suite of software for the control of SLM-based optical tweezers as well as for on-the-fly analysis of high speed video for tracking particles in traps and making force measurements. This software is freely available under the GPL, we only ask that you cite us if you use it in published academic work. We are always interested in new collaborations, if you would like to learn more about our holography software it's often best to pay us a visit. The current "stable" versions of our tweezer control software are below:

• Red Tweezers is our newest version; it is composed of:
  • A LabView 8.6 library containing an easily extensible interface (which can include an image underlay from the microscope- contact us if you're interested in that)
  • A stand-alone OpenGL hologram engine (hologram_server.exe). This is a separate executable which LabView communicates with via UDP, and has a very minimal interface (for speed). To close the window, select it and hit Alt+f4. It requires a recent graphics card and up-to-date driver supporting OpenGL 2 and custom shaders- if it fails to run it is probable that your graphics hardware is the problem. We are happy to advise on cards which we know to work- any of nVidia's graphics cards currently on the market should do, ATI cards should also work but we have done less testing with them.
  • A windowed version of the hologram engine (demo_server.exe) which is easier to use for debugging or demos. This requires GLuT, specifically glut32.dll must be in the same directory for it to run. It can be obtained from the GLuT Website, we are not allowed to redistribute it.
  • A Mac OS X (10.4 or higher) binary of the hologram server.
• Analysis Software implemented in LabView 8.6, which works with our camera suite (below) to allow on-line analysis of commonly used metrics such as power spectra, autocorrelations and histograms of particle position.
• Camera Software for high-speed capture and on-line analysis of camera images. It includes tracking based on a centre-of-mass algorithm as well as template tracking for more complex objects such as cells.
• Blue Tweezers is an older version with the hologram calculation performed in LabView: this is a better place to start if you would like to experiment with different ways of calculating holograms, and should run on any system with LabView 8.6.