Category: Plexon

• 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…

  February 24, 2014

• Plexon Matlab API now available for Linux

  Regular readers of the blog will remember my previous struggles reading .plx files on platforms other than Windows. I got contacted by none other than Plexon boss Harvey Wiggins about this. I’m happy to report that they’ve posted an updated Matlab offline SDK which compiles on 32- and 64-bit Linux. It may be possible to…

  October 13, 2011

• Reading .plx files in Mac/Linux: a Python script

  Update (12/10/2011): Huang Xin has written better Python script based on ctypes, part of RealTimeElectrophy. I posted a few days ago on solutions for reading .plx files on Mac/Linux, and was kind of bummed out that in spite of doing a thorough background search I couldn’t find a really satisfying solution to the problem. So…

  September 12, 2011

• 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…

  September 7, 2011

• Wideband monitor for Plexon hardware

  Plexon has a Matlab API that can be used to stream wideband, LFP and spike data for real-time processing. It’s available in the Downloads section of the Plexon website under the name “Matlab client development kit”. They include several sample applications with the API, including a real-time LFP monitor. However, it’s missing a few features…

  July 20, 2011

• Baudline software for viewing long neural recordings on Linux

  Viewing the frequency spectrum of a wideband or LFP signal is important to detect noise issues, whether line noise, monitor refresh noise, reward artifacts or other anomalies. Removing artifacts is critical not only to obtain clean LFPs and wideband signals, but also to sort spikes in low SNR scenarios, for example with multi-electrode arrays. We…

  May 25, 2011