PASTA

Thanks to Jan Homolak from the Department of Pharmacology, University of Zagreb School of Medicine, Zagreb, Croatia for sharing the following about repurposing a digital kitchen scale for neuroscience research: a complete hardware and software cookbook for PASTA (Platform for Acoustic STArtle).

“As we were starving for a solution on how to obtain relevant and reliable information from a kitchen scale sometimes used in very creative ways in neuroscience research, we decided to cut the waiting and cook something ourselves. Here we introduce a complete hardware and software cookbook for PASTA, a guide on how to demolish your regular kitchen scale and use the parts to turn it into a beautiful multifunctional neurobehavioral platform. This project is still medium raw, as its the work in progress, however, we hope you will still find it well done.
PASTA comes in various flavors such as:
– complete hardware design for PASTA
– PASTA data acquisition software codes (C++/Arduino)
– PASTA Chef: An automatic experimental protocol execution Python script for data acquisition and storage
– ratPASTA (R-based Awesome Toolbox for PASTA): An R-package for PASTA data analysis and visualization

bon appétit!”

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.  Project portal RRID:SCR_021446; Software RRID:SCR_021516