Configuring user settings

Settings such as software paths, microscope settings, system settings and file viewers can be set once for the user. These settings do not vary from one project to other and should be set after creating the first project. The settings manager can be invoked from the right hand side of the main navigation panel.

FocusPreferences

General settings

  • Automatically save the configurations when they are changed (DANGER): This should always be checked, otherwise any parameters changed via the input forms will not be saved.
  • Show advanced by default: The parameters shown are of two levels: BASIC and ADVANCED. The ADVANCED parameters are not shown by default. They become visible when the Show Advanced located on the top of input form is selected. If this option is selected the ADVANCED options are shown by default.
  • Default verbosity level: A default for the verbosity level of the output produced when running a task can be set here.

Microscope settings

Default values for the CS and KV of microscope can be set in this tab.

System settings

Location of the SCRATCH disks for faster I/O and the GPU configuration can be provided in this tab. If you have more than 1 GPU installed, please state that. In case you have more than one GPUs and if you wish to use all of them please sleect Yes for Cycle over GPUs. If this option is No, the GPU stated in Which GPU to use will be used for processing.

Software settings (IMP)

The paths and locations of the external software to be used should be provided in this tab. Some of these are file locations and others are directories. A hover on the label of any parameter will provide more information about the particular file or directory path to be provided.

Status settings

These settings provide parameters to upload the data on the remote server. The Update status data determines if at all the data is to be uploaded to the server. If this is selected the folder specified by Folder for status message images collects the data to be uploaded to the server. This data can be uploaded to the server using the “web/scripts/upload_to_server” script located in the Focus installation. A cron job can be set up to automatically update the data on the server, for example, after every 5 minutes or so.

Optionally, using cadaver utility Focus can automatically upload the data to the server, if the option Server refresh interval is not set to 0. The correct webDAV address and microscope tag for the server is to provided. Note that authentication is done using the .netrc file located on the user home folder. More details about this file can be found elsewhere.

Viewer settings

Viewers provide a way to directly view the scripts and files via Focus. The default options should be fine, but if not, please change them to the software of your choice.

Font settings

Font size and weight can be changed using this tab. Please note that changing this might mess up some fonts, please restart Focus in that case.