Beam Profiler

A real-time laser beam profiler for Thorlabs DCC1545M-GL cameras, built with PySide6 and pyqtgraph. When no hardware is connected, it falls back to a synthetic Gaussian beam for testing.

Features

• Live 2D beam image with selectable colormaps (Gray, Viridis, Inferno, Plasma, Magma, Cividis, Turbo) and linear/log intensity scale
• Axes in µm using the camera sensor geometry
• Projection modes: sum projection, slice at cursor, slice at peak intensity (default)
• ROI selection with zoom-to-ROI (applies to main image and projections)
• Centroid and FWHM tracking with live trend plots
• Auto-exposure
• Fluence calculator (µJ/cm²) with selectable beam-area model: FWHM/2 or 1/e radii
• Draggable crosshair markers
• Simple mode (default) for maximum frame rate; full mode adds trends and advanced metrics
• Multi-camera support — when multiple cameras are connected, a dialog lets you choose by serial number; run the script twice to use two cameras simultaneously
• Export snapshots as PNG, HDF5 (.h5), or ASCII (.txt)
• Analysis snapshot figure with Gaussian fits for integral and slice projections including FWHM values in the legend
• Synthetic camera fallback when no hardware is available

Prerequisites

1. Python 3.11+ (tested with 3.13)
2. DCx / uc480 SDK for the Thorlabs DCC1545M-GL. This repository includes the legacy SDK files under dcx_camera_interfaces_2018_09/. The driver DLL (uc480_64.dll) is loaded via ctypes — no additional pip package is required.

Installation

# Clone the repository
git clone <repo-url>
cd beamprofiler-main

# Create a virtual environment (recommended)
python -m venv .venv

# Activate the virtual environment
# Windows PowerShell:
.venv\Scripts\Activate.ps1
# Windows cmd:
.venv\Scripts\activate.bat

# Install dependencies
pip install -r requirements.txt

Running

python beamprofiler_qt_Thorcam.py

If multiple Thorlabs cameras are connected, a dialog will appear letting you select one by serial number. To open a second camera, run the script again in a separate terminal and pick the other serial number.

If no camera hardware is detected, the application starts in synthetic mode with a simulated Gaussian beam.

Files

File	Description
beamprofiler_qt_Thorcam.py	Main application — Thorlabs DCx beam profiler with full Qt UI
requirements.txt	Python dependencies
run_demo.bat	Windows batch launcher
dcx_camera_interfaces_2018_09/	Legacy DCx / uc480 SDK (drivers, headers, firmware)

Fluence Modes

The fluence panel offers two selectable models:

• Top-hat with FWHM/2 radii (default)
• Top-hat with 1/e radii

The active formula is shown directly in the UI so the current calculation model is always visible.

Snapshot Analysis

Using the Snapshot button stores:

• A rendered .png image
• A .h5 file containing a Python-readable xarray dataset with x_um and y_um coordinates and image/projection data in counts
• An analysis figure (.png) with Gaussian fits for both integral and slice projections, including FWHM values in the legends
• An ASCII .txt export of the raw image data