Software Guide¶
ONIX uses Bonsai for data acquisition. Bonsai is very good at dealing with the asynchronous and heterogeneous data that ONIX hardware produces.
The Bonsai.ONIX pages provide detailed information about the ONIX Bonsai library.
The Example Workflows pages provide example Bonsai.ONIX workflows
Tip
If you want to use ONIX hardware with your acquisition software, please get in touch. It’s not as hard as you might think :).
Where is the Open Ephys GUI Plugin?¶
There is currently no dedicated ONIX plugin available for the Open Ephys GUI. The Open Ephys GUI is built on top of an audio processing library that has trouble dealing with 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. Thiscan 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.