Freibox and an open source commutator

Brice De La Crompe, Megan Schneck, and colleagues from the Optophysiology Lab at Uni Freiburg have developed and shared two exciting additions to the open source tools available for behavioral neuroscience. The first, Freibox, is a versatile and low-cost behavioral testing platform. This Arduino-based behavioral set-up integrates with a custom Python interface to collect data from a licking sensor (strain gauge lickometer) from spatial licking spouts in real time. The feedback to the system can also be used to trigger task events on a submillisecond timescale, which expands the flexibility of the platform for researchers interested in discriminative and serial reversal learning, as well as other tasks. The other tool these researchers have included in their recent publication is an open source commutator to allow freely moving behaviors while recording neural activity from platforms such as Miniscope V4 and OpenEphys. To validate their devices, De La Crompe, Schneck et al. provide the experimental setup and data from an investigation of neuronal correlates of behavioral flexibility with Freibox and 1-Photon calcium imaging. The details to build the Freibox platform and commutator are available from the eNeuro publication and via GitHub!

This research tool was created by your colleagues. Please acknowledge the Principal Investigator, cite the article in which the tool was described, and include an RRID in the Materials and Methods of your future publications. Freibox RRID:SCR_023918; commutator RRID:SCR_023919