AxonInstruments MultiClamp 700B

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Tue, 08/31/2010 - 01:59 pm

I thought that you could use Igor to interface with and to control the commander for the multiclamp 700B amplifier. Does this require an XOP? I am running Igor on a Windows OS and I have a NIDAQ board that Igor is already communicating with. What steps do I need to take to control my MultiClamp with my Igor data acquisition procedure?
Since Igor 6.12, there is a Windows-only AxonTelegraph XOP that ships with Igor (in the More Extensions/Data Acquisition folder) that allows you to read the telegraph outputs from the MultiClamp 700A/B amplifiers. However the XOP does not allow you to directly control the device. To do that, you still need to use the MultiClamp Commander program that Axon ships with the amplifier.

Execute the following command in Igor to bring up the help file for the XOP.
DisplayHelpTopic "AxonTelegraph XOP"


You should be able to use the XOP along with NIDAQ tools from within Igor.

August 31, 2010 at 02:50 pm - Permalink

Even though the XOP can only read "telegraphs" from the amplifier, you still control other aspects of the amplifier with Igor via your digitizer. With the NIDAQ XOP you can set any of the voltages on the NIDAQ board, which in turn control the amplifier. This can be used to control the amplifier commands, as well as the amplifier mode (voltage clamp vs. current clamp). In my experience, there was something flaky about controlling the mode in this way (as opposed to through Multiclamp Commander)... somehow Multiclamp Commander wouldn't realize that some other program had changed the mode and things would go awry. Axon/Molecular Devices may have fixed this in the intervening years.

August 31, 2010 at 09:06 pm - Permalink

Thank you both! That helps a lot. I am new to programming and it is not often intuitive to me how to approach solutions to tasks such as this one.

I really appreciate the support.

September 1, 2010 at 10:16 am - Permalink

Hello guys...
I am not able to set the Amplifier settings for the Multiclamp 700B commander in order to get the exact holding voltage that i am entering. Also If i set the holding voltage to say a set value of -60mV then for that setting of the amplifier the potential that we want to set gets multiplied by a factor of 10 or so. So please can any of you tell me any solution to this problem. Thanks...

August 22, 2011 at 12:03 pm - Permalink

rpatil wrote:
Hello guys...
I am not able to set the Amplifier settings for the Multiclamp 700B commander in order to get the exact holding voltage that i am entering. Also If i set the holding voltage to say a set value of -60mV then for that setting of the amplifier the potential that we want to set gets multiplied by a factor of 10 or so. So please can any of you tell me any solution to this problem. Thanks...


Did nobody reply to this yet? The issue may be that your gains are not being taken into account. These are specified in the toolbox icon in the Multiclamp commander. The default is 20 mV/V (depending on the feedback resistor in the headstage). You need to scale what you actually want by that gain before you send it out through the D/A device to the Command input on the Multiclamp, and it "should" work.
For another solution, check out any of the packages in 3rd party projects that help control data acquisition through Igor. I also have one, mafScope and mafPC for doing this. I don't know how the others work, but my package takes care of all the scaling and gains once they are properly set.

http://biology.buffalo.edu/Faculty/Xu_Friedman/mafPC/sign_in.html

-Matthew

October 25, 2011 at 07:37 am - Permalink