RIVETS

A number of recent studies have provided compelling demonstrations that mice and rats can be trained to perform a variety of tasks while head restrained. The independent development of this technique by a number of labs has led to a variety of solutions, but these solutions are often expensive or impede rapid development and modification. To address these issues, we developed a flexible single platform for electrophysiology and imaging both ex vivo and in vivo. Our design facilitates the rapid conversion of a single physiology and imaging system between preparations and is used by many labs at Janelia and sold by Scientifica.

Real cheap tracker

As part of our work to characterize mice with a variety of manipulations or neural signaling (both acute and chronic) we found ourselves often needing to characterize basic features of locomotion. We wanted a cheap and easy solution. The result was a small piece of code written in JAVA using some open source libraries to extract position of a moving "blob" in real-time. If you find a need for such a piece of code you can feel free to download it and try it out. Please acknowledge this website if you use the software for science. We have tested the software with this and this camera, but it will work with any USB camera that Quicktime can recognize.

Corduroy

We have developed a complete data acquisition and analysis suite of functions written for Igor Pro and NI A/D boards. Both continuous acquistion and episodic acquisition are supported with evolving support for multichannel recordings. If you are interested in receiving a distribution copy contact us.

The corduroy software package works with A/D boards from national instruments; in particular we typically use the PCIe-6259 board. The software is a series of extensions and scripts written for IgorPro from Wavemetrics.