Support for KPA101 (KCubePositionAligner)

[karlduderstadt]

@marktsuchida thanks very much for creating this awesome plugin. We are using it every day for controlling a Thorlabs stage. We not have the need to get the X, Y, and SUM from a Thorlabs position sensor from the KPA101 (KCubePositionAligner?). You state very clearly in the readme this type of cube is not supported.

We would like to add support for retrieving these inputs from the KPA101. Can you provide any suggestions of how to add support for this. Roughly what would be required?

We also considered just using a National Instruments card to get the analog inputs from the cube, but it seems analog input is not currently supported and direct support within this plugin seems more powerful. I do have experience programming in C++, but not creating device adaptors specifically. So any hints would be helpful. Is there a location with related example source code from thorlabs, I think I found this for stages but not positional sensors...sadly.

[karlduderstadt]

After looking around a little more I found there examples from the thorlabs GitHub:
https://github.com/Thorlabs/Motion_Control_Examples/blob/main/C%2B%2B/KCube/KPA101/Thorlabs.MotionControl.KCube.PositionAligner.h
https://github.com/Thorlabs/Motion_Control_Examples/blob/main/C%2B%2B/KCube/KPA101/KPA101_Example.cpp
maybe this offers a way to start...

[marktsuchida]

Thanks for the request! We're planning to work on this in collaboration with Thorlabs. Cannot promise when it will be available, but will update here.