Open Ephys GUI

There is currently no dedicated ONIX plugin available for the Open Ephys GUI. The Open Ephys GUI is built primarily for multichannel electrophysiology using an audio processing library that makes it difficult to deal with multiple asynchronous data streams.

Note

Have a look at the Open Ephys GUI documentation for information on the GUI’s design.

This is fine when the data being processed is synchronized ephys and auxiliary data. However, by design, ONIX hardware makes no such guarantees about the nature of the data it produces. On the contrary, an Acquisition Context manages a table of devices that are potentially all asynchronous from one another. Even though each sample from these devices is individually time-stamped in hardware, there is no guarantee of when they will arrive or in what order. This necessitates the use of event-driven acquisition software that only propagates data when its received, and this is where Bonsai really shines. For this reason, we have dedicated the majority of our development effort toward the Bonsai.ONIX library.

Using the Open Ephys GUI for ONIX Data Visualization

Bonsai provides advanced access to GPU visualization capabilities, but has to be manually programmed to generate high performance real-time plotting. This can be a hurdle for those that just want to see if they have their probe in the right spot. In the future, we aim to change this situation, and eventually provide first-class native ephys visualization capabilities in the Bonsai Editor.

Note

If you want to help improve Bonsai’s Ephys visualization capabilites, get in touch.

In the meantime we can take advantage of the Ephys GUI’s visualization and audio streaming by the Ephys Socket Plugin to receive data from Bonsai.