Hi Chris,
we understand that there are some issues with regard to National Instruments products atm. I am uncertain whether this relates to a recent Mac or a recent mWorks update.
In any case, we have purchased a Neuropixels setup and are about to purchase a chassis that fits the PXIe acquisition module. We would go for the NI model in the picture below unless this may cause issues with our system.
Do you have any experience with Neuropixel systems running with mWorks in that regard?
Thanks for your help with this,
Marcus
Hi Marcus,
NI’s drivers for macOS support only a very limited set of devices. About a year ago, NI announced that they were ceasing development of said drivers. This means that, in the near future, MWorks will no longer have a way to control any NI hardware. However, none of that is relevant for you, as PXIe devices were never supported on macOS.
According to the Neuropixels user manual, the software drivers required to interface with the hardware are available only for Microsoft Windows. (I see that the Open Ephys Neuropixels interface is available only on Windows, too.) Therefore, it won’t be possible for MWorks to support the Neuropixels hardware directly. Any interaction will likely need to take place over a network connection to a Windows machine, potentially via some intermediate software (e.g. a Python script running on the Windows box that receives commands from MWorks via TCP/IP and relays them to the Neuropixels device). Alternatively, if you can communicate with the Neuropixels hardware via TTL signals, then you could use a general-purpose I/O interface (e.g. a Firmata board) to control the hardware from MWorks.
Cheers,
Chris