Open Neuro Interface

ONI is a hardware specification and API that facilitates the creation of tools for neural data acquisition. This standard allows the creation of neural recording devices that support arbitrary mixtures of sensors, probes, and actuators. The hope is that ONI will streamline the development of new hardware for neural data acquisition and guarantee interoperability between ONI-compliant hardware and software. We also hope that the use of common protocols will allow easy integration of disparate hardware to develop rich feedback control loops for neuroscience projects. If you are interested in developing against this specification (e.g., for a miniscope, headstage, position tracker, 2P microscope, etc.) or improving it, we would love to hear from you and talk about the best way to proceed.

Specification Goals

• Potential for low latency round trip times with a computer in the loop.

• Potential for high-bandwidth, bidirectional communication (thousands of neural data channels, multiple high-resolution cameras).

• Acquisition and control of arbitrary hardware components using a common computer interface.

  • Support generic mixes of data sources and sinks from multiple, asynchronous pieces of hardware.

  • Generic, system-wide hardware configuration.

  • Generic, system-wide, bidirectional data streaming.

• Hardware synchronization of multiple systems on a single host computers or across multiple host computers.

• Cross platform.

• Aimed at the creation of interoperable physical devices, gateware, firmware, and APIs.

Contents

ONI Hardware Specification

Create ONI-compliant hardware.

ONI API Documentation

Create software for controlling ONI-compliant hardware.

Contributing

The main branch contains the stable version of the specification. The unstable work in progress version can be found in the branch indicating the version.