HEKA patch amplifiers compatibility

[louison pineau]

Hi,

In the documentation I couldn't find any support infos for HEKA patch amplifiers. As anyone tried to configure ACQ4 to run with EPC-10 amps ?

Thanks !

Bests,

Louison

[Luke Campagnola]

Hello Louison,

ACQ4 has no support for HEKA amplifiers. If it's possible to control them via python or a DLL, then I'd be happy to provide assistance in writing this code, but my recollection from long ago was that this would be difficult and possibly require assistance from the hardware manufacturers.

Cheers,

Luke

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Subject: [acq4] HEKA patch amplifiers compatibility

 

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[louison pineau]

Thank you for your answer, I will try asking people from HEKA and I'll let you know whether it's feasible.

Bests,

Louison

[louison pineau]

Okay so I looked a bit and it appears that there is indeed a DLL file that can be used. I'm still waiting for more precison from HEKA:

Cheers,

Louison

[louison pineau]

So apparently, it's possible to control EPC10 through another software using the Batch communication function of Patchmaster. From what I understood (this is quite new to me, I used Python mainly for analysis and stats so far, this is more like software development and I'm not sure where I'm going), ACQ4 and Patchmaster could communicate via 2 ASCII files. One command file that would be edited by ACQ4 and a response file written by Patchmaster. The thing is, I have no idea how ACQ4 could edit this ASCII file in real time during an experiment.

Bests,

Louison

[Luke Campagnola]

It doesn't sound too difficult .. Can you provide a link to details?

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From: ac...@googlegroups.com <ac...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of louison pineau <louison....@gmail.com>

Sent: Tuesday, July 16, 2024 05:33
To: ACQ4 <ac...@googlegroups.com>
Subject: Re: [acq4] HEKA patch amplifiers compatibility

 

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[louison pineau]

There's not much informations on HEKA's websites but after asking them directly, I got these 2 pdf files describing the procedures.

[louison pineau]

Hello, I was wondering if it would be simpler to make ACQ4 and a HEKA EPC10 communicate through the built-in DAQ board inside the amplifier (LIH8+8 model). There's a DLL file available for this DAQ. Do you think it would be possible to create a driver for this type of DAQ ? If so, How would you procede ?

[Luke Campagnola]

Yes, my preference would probably have been to directly access the devices via their DLLs, but this depends on having adequate documentation for both devices. Once that is available, you can use python's ctypes library to call any routines from the DLLs, and then the goal would be to make a device class for the EPC10 and the LIH8+8 that inherits from acq4.devices.PatchClamp. If you can get this documentation, then let's have a call sometime to read it together and come up with a strategy (and if not, then let's talk instead about what can be accomplished with the scripting interface).

Cheers,

Luke

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From: ac...@googlegroups.com <ac...@googlegroups.com> on behalf of louison pineau <louison....@gmail.com>

Sent: Monday, November 18, 2024 06:11

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