Data Acquisition

Data produced by ONIX hardware is captured using data input operators and sent to hardware using data output operators, respectively. This section covers their use.

Acquire Data

Streaming data into Bonsai requires at least one data I/O operator.

Set up data I/O operator(s)

Place a data I/O operator and set its DeviceName property for every device from which you would like to stream. Setting the DeviceName property will tell the operator from which device to stream data. This is referred to linking the data I/O operator to the device. Take this workflow for example:

AnalogInput's DeviceName property is set to "BreakoutBoard/AnalogIO" so it will stream data from the AnalogIO device on the breakout board.

Use Multiple Instances of Identical Hardware

Multiple headstages/miniscopes

Linking the data I/O operator to devices when using two identical headstages or miniscopes involves an additional step: renaming a configuration operator. Suppose you want to stream orientation data from two Neuropixels 2.0 Headstages through using two PolledBno055Data operators. By default, the ConfigureHeadstageNeuropixelsV2e operators are both named "HeadstageNeuropixelsV2e". This causes their devices to also have identical names, "HeadstageNeuropixelsV2e/PolledBno055". The two headstages and their devices must be disambiguated. To do this, you must edit one or both of headstages' Name property:

After this, the disambiguated source can be selected for each data operator

In the following workflow workflow, the Name property of each ConfigureHeadstageNeuropixelsV2e has been changed from "HeadstageNeuropixelsV2e" to "HS-NPX-AB" and "HS-NPX-B". The DeviceName of each of the PolledBno055Data operators has been set to "HS-NPX-A/PolledBno055" and "HS-NPX-B/PolledBno055" from the dropdown so each operator will take data from a different headstage.

Multiple ONIX systems

If a second ONIX system is used on the same computer, a second configuration chain operator is required. In this case, the Index property of the configuration chain that corresponds to the second system should be set to 1. If three systems are used, they would have Index values of 0, 1, and 2. etc.

Now that you can stream data into Bonsai from ONIX hardware, the next step is visualize the data.