Experimental Notes for VLM one photon experiments

There are 3 computers to drive the behavior.

• The computer that drives the behavior camera (1)

passsord : VLM10000

• The computer that drives the behavior electronic (2)

password : fujiyama

• The computer that drives the calcium camera (3)

password : VLM10000

On Computer (1) is usint Matlab 2013b to connect to the firewire camera. We use the image acquisition toolbox as it provides better performance and no dropped frames.

On Computer (2) is using matlab 2013b and Matlab NEEDS to be started as administrator. This is to enable the behavior system to launch a little program called devcon that turns on and off the mouse behavior tracking behavior mouse. It does so by accessing the conf panel properties of windows and directly disabling the device in windows.

Then start Mosaic by moving the current directory in Matlab to MosaicDistributed in the Document folder and typing Mosaic under Matlab command prompt. You should have then access to a GUI and all behavior related apps are under Stim>>Visual>>VLM reborn

on Computer (3), we use HCImageLive, the software directly from Hamamatsu to get the camera data.

The camera must be appropriately configurated. In particular, check the exposure time to be 50 ms (for 20 Hz). In addition, in Trigger modes, output trigger needs to be set to 2. This is to send the frame clock to the computer (2) and (1) so that they can sync their data to the calcium movie. Set kind to PROGRAMABLE and Active to EDGE. In Programmable Trigger Option, set source to READOUT END. It is important to make sure that computer (2) does receive this signal that is routed via BNC cables to the counter port of USB-6009 NI box. You can use the Measurement & Automation Explorer on computer (2) to check that the counter does increases appropriately (ONE counter value per frame). Again it is VERY important to check that this is set correctly otherwise it can causes very serious syncing issues and the data is going to the trash.

Computer (1) and (2) have a shared folder that is mapped through the network on computer (3) so as to allow data transfer from (1) and (2) to external hard drives connected to computer (3) at the end of each experiments