I work for the Brain Research Center, Optical Imaging Laboratory as a computer and electronics engineer, I am in charge of the development of new computerized experimental set-ups for optical imaging. These set-ups are used by the students in the lab as tools for functional brain mapping.

In the past few years I have been involved in the following projects:

• Disk Speed checking program.
• Acquisition of CCD data - A setup that is based on a CCD camera by FUJI Photo Film HR Deltaron 1700 that takes up to 1700 frames per second and is used to to collect images that are generated by voltage sensitive dyes. In this design, I had to do GPIB communication under WinNT, do modification to the camera firmware (this was done in Z80 assembler), and to developed a Heart Beat respiration controller which was based on a Microchip PIC 16C57 and implemented RS232 to communicate with the PC.
  
• Acquisition of Video Data - This system is based on a B&W video camera and a Differential Video Amplifier that enables us to see 1/1000 changes in the light reflected from live brain tissue. Such optical signals are smaller than one gray level, but we needed to measure those signal with an 8 bit video digitizer. Therefore I designed a differential video amplifier which amplifies the difference between the incoming camera video signal from a reference video signal. This design included Analog and Digital circuits. The digital part was made of two Altera EP610 EPLDs, one to control video timing and the other to interface lab equipment to the printer port of the PC. The computer system was based on an EISA IBM-PC that collected video frames into 64MB of RAM and 10GB disk. I had to interface to the Image IM-640 frame grabber (made by ) and to write software in C to collect and analyze data. The software is written using MetaWare High C compiler running under PharLap 386 Dos Extender. In this system, we have also integrated two other boards PIO-12 and CTM-05 made by . I finished this project by helping to design a printed circuit board which was passed on to a manufacturing company. In the differential amplifier I also use components like Harris, HA-2405 PRAM Four Channel Programmable Amplifiers, HA-2542 Wideband, High Slew Rate, High Output Current Operational Amplifier and HA-5330 Very High Speed Precision Monolithic Sample and Hold Amplifier.
• An EEG acquisition system that helped us look for functional borders between different areas in human brain and was used in a study at a hospital during surgery to remove a tumor. The system collect EEG signals using DAS-1602 A/D boards (made by ). In this project I defined the setup, I wrote software that used the A/D board and defined noise cancellation algorithms.
• Dye screening controller. This device is used by our chemist for checking new dyes that she develops. This design is based on an Altera EP610 EPLD and uses a Harris, HI-508 Analog multiplexer.
• Acquisition Watchdog timer - A PIC 16C54 RISC micro controller (or 16C54 ) based watchdog timer for long timeout periods. The microcontroller is made by Arizona Microchip Inc.
• Respirator - Heart Beat Synchronization controller - A PIC 16C57 RISC micro controller based synchronization controller that communicate to a PC via RS232 for selection of 4 synchronization modes and timing data. This project is done using CCS PCB C compiler
• I have used a Burr-Brown , UAF42 - Universal Action Filter as a 50Hz notch filter used for electrical recording of spikes collected from neurons in vivo.