Table of Contents

Headstage 64 Configuration

The following excerpt from the Headstage 64 example workflow demonstrates how to configure your Headstage 64 and Breakout Board in Bonsai. This process comprises of the following steps:

~/workflows/hardware/hs64/configuration.bonsai workflow

NOTE

To learn more about the top-level configuration motif in every workflow involving ONIX hardware, visit the Configuration Chain Tutorial.

Creating an Acquisition Context

The CreateContext operator creates a ContextTask that defines the device driver and index where the hardware exists. The Driver property is set to "riffa" which is the name of the PCIe device used by ONIX. In this case, the Index property is set to 0 because there is only a single ONIX system. If a second system is used on the same computer, a second CreateContext operator would be required in its own configuration chain, with its Index property set to 1.

Configuring the Breakout Board and Headstage 64

The ConfigureBreakoutBoard operator configures the Onix Breakout Board. In the Headstage 64 example tutorial, it is configured to enable digital inputs to serve as a trigger for the Headstage 64's electrical and optical stimulation and to enable monitoring of the percentage of memory occupied. This is accomplished by leaving all of the ConfigureBreakoutBoard properties set to their default values except its Memory Monitor Enable property is set to True.

The ConfigureHeadstage64 operator is used to configure the Headstage 64. In the Headstage 64 example tutorial, it is configured to enable streaming of electrophysiology data from a Rhd2164 amplifier, orientation data from the on-board Bno055 IMU, and position data from the Ts4231. This is accomplished in the Headstage 64 example workflow by leaving all of the ConfigureHeadstage64 properties set to their default values.

When the workflow is started, the current time (based on Coordinated Universal Time) is saved, along with global hardware parameters governing data acquisition. This is accomplished using a TimeStamp operator to capture the computer's wall clock time. The timestamp is saved along with ContextTask's properties (e.g. AcquisitionClockHz, BlockReadSize, BlockWriteSize) to a csv file (start-time_<filecount>.csv) when the workflow is started.

Starting Acquisition

After starting a workflow, the StartAcquisition operator begins data acquisition with the hardware that has been configured. In the Headstage 64 example workflow, most collected data is from the Headstage 64. The rate of data being produced by the hardware will be ~4.1 MB/s. The ReadSize property is set to 4096 bytes, meaning data collection will wait until 4096 bytes of data have been produced by the hardware. At 4.1 MB/s the hardware will produce 4096 bytes every ~1000 μs. This is a hard bound on the latency of the system. If lower latencies were required, the hardware would need to produce data more quickly or the ReadSize property value would need to be reduced.

The WriteSize property is set to 2048 bytes. This determines the amount of memory that is preallocated for temporarily holding data before it is sent to hardware. It is less critical to performance unless the rate that data be written to the hardware is comparable to the rate that the hardware produces data, which is not a common scenario.

NOTE

For an overview of the devices on the Headstage 64 that can be configured through the ConfigureHeadstage64 operator, visit the Headstage 64 Overview.

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