The Computer used for controlling AIS 2 is a standard PC running under Microsoft Windows® 2000 Professional. Other operating systems like Mac OS or Linux are currently not supported.

A desktop housing was selected to allow for stacking of components:

 

The use of older inverted Zeiss microscopes require a special I/O card for input of information about the lens currently in light path of the microscope. Also, the motorized "Axiovert" 135M is completely controlled by this card.

The new "Axiovert" 200 series microscopes have build in lens position encoding. Therefore, they require both the interface board built into the microscope (Carl Zeiss part No.: 000000-1015-381) and an additional serial port in the computer.

The video image of the microscopic field is digitized by a standard frame grabber board.

For file transfer (images, program updates, web access) a 10/100 MBit ethernet board allows for connecting to a local network.