Is there an OS independent way to analyze MWorks behavioral files?

Support
1

Hi Chris,

Sorry if there are duplicate questions, I wrote a ‘private discussion’ question to you but I couldn’t figure out how to see if anyone replied to that question, so I decided to make a profile and post here.

The question relates to whether we can get an architecture independent method for data analysis, particularly in Matlab., I saw in the thread how to use getCodecs and getEvents in Matlab to extract the behavioral data offline, however these Matlab functions (1) use a mexmaci64 file which is Mac OS dependent, and (2) all of the Matlab code is wrapped into the OS installation file, which is a headache to unrap in Linux or Windows systems.

Do you have any suggestions for how to extract the mworks behavioral files in Matlab under a non-OS architecture?

Travis

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Hi Travis,

The short answer is no. mwfeval.mexmaci64 depends on the MWorksCore framework, and that isn’t portable beyond OS X.

One thing you might look at is pymorks, which is a pure-Python and therefore (potentially) cross-platform package for reading MWorks data. It was written by an MWorks user, so I can’t vouch for it (or support it), but you may find it useful. I assume you could find another Python package that could re-package the data extracted by pymorks into native MATLAB format. Or, if you were feeling very ambitious, you could re-implement the guts of pymorks in MATLAB, which would give you a cross-platform solution without the intermediate hop through Python.

Cheers,
Chris Stawarz

3

Thanks Chris!,

I assume by the MWorksCore framework, that refers to a bunch of OS X specific functions? My thought was to just create a Windows compatible mwfeval.mex.

I’ll definitely give pyworks a try.

If any other ideas pop into your had I’d love to hear them.

Thanks
Travis

4

Hi Travis,

I assume by the MWorksCore framework, that refers to a bunch of OS X specific functions?

By “MWorksCore framework”, I mean /Library/Frameworks/MWorksCore.framework, which is where the guts of MWServer reside. Porting it to another platform would be nearly equivalent to porting all of MWorks to that platform – not a small task!

Cheers,
Chris