Control of intan RHD2000 digital and analogue outputs

[Jay McNally]

Is there a way to access the digital or analogue outputs of the Intan RHD2000 eval. board for use as sink/output for a data stream in Bonsai? The ephys package only provides for use of data from the board as an input/source.
I would like to try to use one of the digital outputs on the board to control another piece of hardware. Perhaps this is possible via python script?

Thanks for any help you may be able to provide.

[Gonçalo Lopes]

Hi Jay and welcome to the forums.

Actually no, there isn't a way to access the RHD2000 outputs just yet. The honest reason is that no one ever needed it before.

However, I agree it should be possible. I've opened a ticket with this issue at the bonsai.neuro site:

https://bitbucket.org/horizongir/bonsai.neuro/issue/1/add-support-for-setting-the-rhd2000-analog

You can follow the ticket to be notified about development status. I may have some time to look at it this weekend, it will depend on how challenging the implementation turns out to be.

Thanks for the feedback!

[Jay McNally]

Thanks so much for your reply, and efforts to resolve. I will keep an eye on the opened ticket.
In the interim, perhaps I should just buy an arduino, as it looks like it could be incorporated into our setup to do what we are hoping to do.

One further question: I noticed in an earlier post that there may be support for DAQ boards produced by other companies beyond intan. Is this restricted to just National Instruments products, or are there others (eg. Molecular Devices or CED units)?

Thanks again for all of your help, Goncalo.

- Jay   

[Gonçalo Lopes]

At the moment Bonsai has been used to interface successfully with the following DAQs:

• Rhythm FPGA (Open-Ephys and Intan)
• Arduino
• NI-DAQ
• FlyPad
• Hamamatsu C8855-01 photon counting unit
  
• Neuronexus Cheetah

It can in principle be extended to many others, as long as there are publicly available SDKs for interfacing with the hardware. Do you know if Molecular Devices or CED units have an API that allows external software to talk to their acquisition units? It would be great to know and I could open some tickets for future integration projects if that was the case.

[Jay McNally]

Yes, dev kits are available for both units. The CED one is very easy to find on their website (http://ced.co.uk/downloads/1401downloads). The Molecular Devices one is a bit trickier, as you need to register to get access.

[Gonçalo Lopes]

Thanks for the links!

The CED dev kit looks very accessible, it's certainly doable. They don't seem to announce any specific software redistribution license, so I'm assuming you could in theory make a Bonsai package to support it quite easily and distribute it publicly.

Surprisingly, that has been one of the major blockers of new Bonsai packages, not the code, but some of the hardware vendors which adopt a position where they will hoard their software with extraordinarily strict redistribution licenses on their SDKs (e.g. Molecular Devices seems to be this way, but there are others like Point Grey, NI, etc, etc)... you start wondering what they care about, is it selling hardware or software?

Anyway, setting the ranting aside, CED seems very doable. I can open a ticket for it but this one will have to wait at least until the holidays. The added difficulty is that I have no CED hardware to try the code on, so it would be impossible to debug. I can certainly show someone who is technically inclined how to do it if there is interest.

Cheers,

[Amina Kinkhabwala]

Has this become possible? I'm curious what the update is. Thanks!

[Gonçalo Lopes]

Hi Amina,

Not yet, unfortunately. It should be a relatively simple extension. I will see if I can do the update after the new version comes out. Keep an eye out on the ticket:

https://bitbucket.org/horizongir/bonsai.neuro/issues/1/add-support-for-setting-the-rhd2000-analog

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[Amina Kinkhabwala]

Okay good to know. I guess it's always solvable by throwing in a cheap arduino, which is my solution.