integration LED driver and USB-ME32FAI-system

Dear,

We are trying to build a new setup for optical stimulation and in vitro MEA recording on hippocampal neurons. The hardware components we have are the following:
- A STG2004 stimulus generator
- The 32 channel USB-ME32FAI-system
- A LED driver LEDD1B from Thor labs (BNC input for triggering with 5V TTL pulses)
- A custom recording chip with custom adaptors to the MPA8I headstages.
We would like to see the spontaneous activity, then stimulate with eg. 10 pulses of 25ms at 10Hz (triggered by the STG2004) and assess whether the stimulation influences the activity.
My questions are now:
- How do we best synchronize the recording and the LED driver pulses in hardware and software? How do we program the STG and how do we connect is to the recording system? Can the STG give the pulses of the LED driver and can it also give one synchronization pulse to the recording system at the time the stimulation starts? Can we do this repeatedly (eg. every 10s).
- How can we best visualize the activity? Is there a way to plot the spikes/time stamps over a long period (eg. minutes), together with the trigger of stimulation? Ideally I would like to see a raster plot of the time stamps of the spikes 10s before the stimulation, and 20s after the stimulation, and this a few times in a row plotted under each other, is this possible? Which Rack buildup do you recommend?

Many thanks

Dear Marleen,

the USB-ME32 FAI system has two lemo connectors on the rear side for in and outbut of one bit of the digital channel. Those are basically miniature versions of BNC connectors. So you could use the STG2004 as a master controlling the data acquisition in the USB ME32 FAI via TTL pulses and drive the LED via the same set of TTL´s.

The easiest way of using the STG2004 for this is creating TTL in the SynchOut channels. This will avoid “wasting“ one stimulation channel.

Greetings

Thomas

Hello,
We have a MCS wireless 2100 advance system and would like to synchronise this with other devices using a TTL pulse sent on the digital out of the interface board. Please could you describe in more detail on how this is done? We are currently using multichannel experimenter to record our data, but can't find a way of controlling digital outs.
Thanks,
Soraya