Category: Hardware
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Fixing broken .m4v movies made in Matlab
I made a few ten-minute movies in Matlab composed of 1-second clips from BBC Earth, encoded as H.264, to use as visual stimuli. They played fine on Windows but would stop at the 170 second mark in Quicktime on Mac. We’re using Processing on Mac for visual display, which uses Quicktime in the background, so…
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Compressing wideband signals with FLAC
We’ve been recording neurons on Utah arrays for ~3 years now. That creates a lot of data, and we keep buying more drives (above – there’s about 30TB of storage on the hub computer). Drives themselves are cheap; it’s backing up the data which becomes expensive in the long run, both in terms of bandwidth…
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Setting up a cluster for the analysis of neural array data
As I’ve mentioned before, we’ve been recording from a Utah array for more than a year now. We use a custom Plexon MAP system that allows for the recording of wideband data at 10 kHz over 96 channels. This custom configuration was requested so that we can get spike-free LFPs by preprocessing wideband data with…
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xkcd’s cloud viewer, binocular vision and telestereoscopes
A recent xkcd comic illustrated a really neat idea: enhancing binocular vision artificially to view distant objects in “true” 3d. Binocular disparity, the mismatch between the position of objects between the two eyes, is a particularly strong 3d cue. It’s really only well useful for objects which are physically close to the observer. You can…
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Reading Plexon files in Linux or Mac
Updates (12/10 /2011): Plexon now offers a mex extension for Matlab which compiles on Linux and Mac. I have a Python .plx file reader available, and Huang Xin has a better one based on ctypes, part of RealTimeElectrophy. Plexon hardware is meant to interface with Windows-only tools (including recording software). I think that for such…
xcorr: AI & neuro 