Zeiss and Confocal both down

As of today, both the confocal and the Zeiss mercury lamp were not working.

The Atto Arc for the Zeiss went down sometime between Tuesday afternoon and Wednesday morning. Sam Byerly, our new Zeiss rep, came promptly on Thursday and checked it out. He said that both fuses were blown, replaced them both, unplugged the power supply, then plugged it in and fired it up again. It blew the fuses again, so he said that it needs to be replaced. Zeiss no longer services Atto Arcs, so we need to buy either a FluoArc to go with our existing mercury lamp housing or upgrade to an X-Cite system that should provide homogeneous illumination without needing any alignment whatsoever. It looks like the X-Cite is the way to go, but it could be 1-4 weeks before it arrives and gets installed.

The confocal apparently went down sometime between Thursday early evening and Friday morning. The problem is the laser controller, which won't communicate properly with the computer. The power light comes on, but not the ready light, and if you try to boot the software anyway, it says it can't communicate with the IP address (of the controller, presumably). I had Heather from the IT dept look at it, and she felt that it wasn't just a cable problem. I called Nikon and they were baffled by the problem. They said they'd never heard of anything like this happening.

I grew concerned about the possibility of a power surge causing our problems, but spoke with an electrician who said that we would likely have noticed more damage to other pieces of equipment if there had been a surge. I picked up some surge protectors from the IT dept and also had Bruce take a look at the mercury power supply, since Zeiss won't service it in any way regardless.

Nikon eventually called me back and told me that there is some troubleshooting we can try on Monday, but that we probably need to pack things up and ship them to Nikon for repair.

New calendaring up and running

I've been working on the website trying to integrate the new Google calendars into it, and things seem to be working well. Anyone wishing to self-schedule on the new calendars will need to use a Google account, and all others can simply fill out a request form to be scheduled for equipment use. Haven't had any major problems as yet, and have received a fair amount of positive feedback. The website has been revamped, and all the instructions and forms are now available online.