Synching with blackrock via serial port

Support
1

hi chris,

just wanted to pick your brain about the possibility of bypassing NIDAQ in order to sync mworks with blackrock.

my colleague romesh and i were able to send words using a serial connection and it looks rather easy. how easy would it be to implement such a module in mworks?

the only issue that we foresee is that there is no feedback signal, from blackrock. that is a really nice feature of the DIO that allows us to check the timing of both systems.

just want to throw it out there as maybe an option worth pursuing.

best
najib

2

Hi Najib,

Writing an MWorks plugin to send words via a serial port wouldn’t be too difficult. However, it’ll probably be a month or more before I really have time to work on one.

I checked the Cerebus manual, but it doesn’t say much about how serial input works. Do you just send it one byte at a time, each of which gets saved as a 8-bit digital input value?

Chris

3

Thanks Chris.
When you have time please let me know, it will be awesome to have an
alternative that allows us to talk directly to Cerebus as compared to going
through NIDAQ or ITC.
Serial works exactly as you described, you open a port with the
specifications described by blackrock and you send it one byte at a time
and it gets saved as an 8-bit digital input.
We were able to do it here using Python and Matlab and from a terminal
program. You probably have a better idea of the Objective C serial API.

In theory serial is faster than parallel because Blackrock reads it at
115kHz, compared to the parallel ports’ 30kHz read out rate, but because we
are using USB to serial there is a buffering lag.
Whatever plug in ends up being written, we need to specify the serial port
device driver.

What we have is this old USB serial port adapter:

http://marc-oya.eu/keyspan.html

but if it is easier to right for the newer ones with the more latest
driver, that should work as well.

If you need the python/matlab code let me know.

Thanks
Najib