Getting Started¶
If Cockpit is being installed for the first time and in the absence of any configuration files, Cockpit simulates a series of devices. While this is useful for testing, the goal of Cockpit is to control a real microscope. Configuring Cockpit to connect and control your own devices requires two things:
Setup a Python-Microscope device-server for each of devices to be used.
Configure Cockpit’s depot to use those devices.
Configuration of the device servers is outside the scope of this documentation, refer to Microscope’s documentation. This document is about configuring Cockpit proper.
Configuring Cockpit for the first time¶
If running Cockpit for the first time there will be no configuration
files present. These can be created with any text editor in a
platform and specific location. The
“best” location is also use case specific. For example, if this is an
end-user system, i.e., users are not expected to be making changes,
then a system wide configuration is better suited. In the specific
case of Microsoft Windows, the system-wide file to configure what
devices to use is C:\ProgramData\cockpit\depot.conf.
The format of this file is defined in the Depot configuration section but it might be simpler to start with someone else’s file as a starting point. Some example configuration files can be found here.
Once the file is created, verify that the depot file is working correctly, and devices are connected with:
python3 -m cockpit.status