Hi Chris, Thank you for the Nightly Built. It solved the conflicting timing of two event codes being sent at the same time. Now we’ve encountered a similar problem with turn_laser_on() and update_display(). This will be our priority for next week since we will be recording very soon. We would appr…

Your MWorks experiment can’t be open, otherwise MWorks and MATLAB are going to interfere with each other. I recommend closing MWServer before you run timeLaserConfig. Chris

Hi Chris, We were able to do this testing on both a Mac and a PC. Both had a delay of ~60ms. Then I think we can rule out MWork or MacOS causing the delay. We are waiting for Karim’s response but thank you again for helping us troubleshooting. Best, Taylor

Hi Chris - We passed your Matlab test to Karim (Laser developer) - and he thought there might be a better way to measure serial communication time. He ended up measuring the delays on his end - and found them to be close to 10-19 ms. His intuition is that the delays in “execution time” that we’re m…

Hi Yasmine, Does any of this new info suggest that we might be able to optimize the MWorks laser to get the delay a bit shorter? No. He says he looked at my code. Did he ever try running it? It sounds like he didn’t, and he answered a different question entirely: Response time here is defin…

Hi Chris - You are correct. Karim doesn’t use/have Matlab. I’ll push him to do the tests you suggested. Best, Yasmine

Hi Yasmine, You are correct. Karim doesn’t use/have Matlab. I can easily write a Python version of the test for him, if he can run that. Also, are you sure it’s really worth your time to pursue this further? As we’ve discussed, even if it does take ~60ms to configure the laser, you should be a…

Hi Chris - Thanks for elaborating. Agreed. Based on recent measurements we’ve made, setting the laser gate high takes about 1-2ms (not more). Forwarding just one final message from Karim. I thought you wanted to know the time between sending the command to the modulator and generating an optical…

Hi Yasmine, Since 90% of our protocols involve variations in only 1 channel of light, is it possible to only configure 1 channel (or alternatively only the relevant subset of channels) thereby reducing the ~60ms delay further? Yes, that’s certainly possible. I’ll have to modify the QCUALOR plug…

Hi Chris - Sorry for the delay! Taylor and I finally had a chance to chat about this! We really like your suggested changes - and Taylor suggested a minor modification related to the laser hardware. In practice, since channels 1&2 share a single optical fiber output (as do channels 3&4) we really…

Hi Yasmine, Your proposal makes sense and seems like a good compromise. Just to be completely clear, MWorks will do the following: When the experiment loads, explicitly set all channels to “off”. When start_io_device is called, if either of channel 1 or channel 2 has a mode other than “off”,…

The timing between turning laser on and stimulus on

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The timing between turning laser on and stimulus on

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