Re: Using Eyelink 1000 parallel port

[Sol Simpson]

If you want to have your psychopy program send TTL triggers to the eyelink, that cause the eyelink system to 'do something', like start /stop recording, then you need to use a TTL connection from your pscyhopy PC to the parallel port of the Host PC of your EyeLink system. If you do not have a parallel port on your psychopy PC, you could use a USB to TTL (digital output) device instead of the parallel port, with timing delay / uncertainty being about 0.5 to 1 msec. If you are OK manually causing the trigger, then the parallel port button box / game pad that came with your EyeLink system can be used to manually trigger the action on the EyeLink by mapping a button input to the desired action. This is normally done by updating the buttons.ini file on your eyeink Host PC, in the exe directory.

If your end goal to be able to control the eyelink from pscyhopy, and / or send synchronization messages  (as text stings) from the psychopy program to the eyelink system, then you can just use the EyeLink python API (pylink), which you may already have if you used the PsychoPy binary installer for your OS. Or you could install ioHub and its dependencies and use the EyeLink implementation of the common eye tracker interface that is available via it. https://www.github.com/isolver/ioHub. 

This approach (using on of the API interfaces) gives you total control of the EyeLink system and allows you to access eye data during your experiment runtime. If using coder, it is just extra / scripting, if using builder, I assume you could add custom blocks of Python code in your builder experiment to call the necessary API functions, but I do not use builder so can not confirm this.

Details on how to map a TTL input or parallel port button presses to the Eyeink Host to an eyelink command, or details on how to use the pylink package directly, should be asked on the www.sr-support.com support forum, or email SRR support.

Thank you.

Sol

On Monday, January 28, 2013 6:06:49 AM UTC-5, dimitri bayle wrote:

Hello,

I want to send triggers to the eyelink 1000 system but i dont have the I/O optional card.
Do you known if i can used the "parallel port button box", normally used for the button box, to sendt trigger from my stimulation PC to the eyelink system.

I've try but no events are record in the EDF files. Is there something to configure to do that

Thanks