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SignalBuddy
SEPTEMBER 19, 2019
Richard Warren, a graduate student in the Sawtell lab at Columbia University, recently shared his new open-source project called SignalBuddy:
SignalBuddy is an easy-to-make, easy-to-use signal generator for scientific applications. Making friends is hard, but making SignalBuddy is easy. All you need is an Arduino Uno! SignalBuddy replaces more complicated and (much) more expensive signal generators in laboratory settings where one millisecond resolution is sufficient. SignalBuddy generates digital or true analog signals (sine waves, step functions, and pulse trains), can be controlled with an intuitive serial monitor interface, and looks fabulous in an optional 3D printed enclosure.
To get SignalBuddy working, all you need to do is install the SignalBuddy.ino Arduino code provided on their github, and follow the step-by-step instructions on github to get the Arduino programmed up for your specific experimental needs. SignalBuddy can be used for numerous lab purposes, including creating pulse trains for optogenetic light stimulation, microstimulation, electrophysiology, or for programming up stimuli for behavioral paradigms.
Additionally, their hackaday site provides the instructions for 3D printing an enclosure to house the Arduino inside using just two .stl files.
For more information, check out the SignalBuddy github repository here.
You can also get further details on the SignalBuddy Hackaday.io page here.
Fun Fact: This group also developed KineMouse Wheel, a project previously posted on OpenBehavior and is now being used in numerous labs! Cheers to another great open-source project from Richard Warren and the Sawtell lab!
Curated Itinerary on Open-Source Tools at SfN-19
September 5, 2019
OpenBehavior is now an official part of the SfN team for curated itineraries at SfN-19! This year, we will provide an itinerary on Open-Source Tools. Linda Amarante (@L_Amarante) and Samantha White (@samantha6rose) are working on the itinerary now. If you would like your presentation to be included, please DM us through our Twitter account (@OpenBehavior) or send an email message about your presentation to openbehavior@gmail.com before noon on Saturday, September 8. Thanks!
RAD
August 1, 2019
In their recent eNeuro article, Bridget Matikainen-Ankney and colleagues from the Kravitz Lab have developed and shared their device, rodent activity detector (RAD), a low-cost system that can track and record activity in rodent home cages.
Physical activity is an important measure used in many research studies and is an important determinant of human health. Current methods for measuring physical activity in laboratory rodents have limitations including high expense, specialized caging/equipment, and high computational overhead. To address these limitations, Matikainen-Ankney et al. designed an open-source and cost-effective device for measuring rodent behavior.
In their new manuscript, they describe the design and implementation of RAD, rodent activity detector. The system allows for high throughput installation, minimal investigator intervention and circadian monitoring. The design includes a battery powered passive infrared (PIR) sensor, microcontroller, microSD card logger, and an oLED screen for displaying data. All of the build instructions for RAD manufacture and programming, including the Arduino code, are provided on the project’s website.
The system records the number of PIR active bouts and the total duration the PIR is active each minute. The authors report that RAD is useful for quantifying changes across minutes rather than on a second to second time-scale, so the default data-logging frequency is set to one minute. The CSV files can be viewed and data visualized using provided python scripts. Device validation with video monitoring strongly correlated PIR data with speed and showed it recorded place to place locomotion but not slow or in place movements. To verify the device’s utility, RAD was used to collect physical activity data from 40 animals for 10 weeks. RAD detected high fat diet (HFD)-induced changes in activity and quantified individual animals’ circadian rhythms. Several major advantages of this tool are that the PIR sensor is not triggered by activity in other cages, it can detect and quantify within-mouse activity changes over time, and little investigator intervention other than infrequent battery replacement is necessary. Although the design was optimized for the lab’s specific caging, the open-source nature of the project makes it easily modifiable.
More details on RAD can be found in their eNeuro manuscript here, and all documentation can also be found on the project’s Hackaday.io page.
ezTrack
June 13, 2019
Zach Pennington from Denise Cai’s lab at Mt. Sinai recently posted a preprint describing their latest open-source project called ezTrack:
ezTrack is an open-source, platform independent set of behavior analysis pipelines using interactive Python (iPython/Jupyter Notebook) that researchers with no prior programming experience can use. ezTrack is a sigh of relief for researchers with little to no computer programming experience. Behavioral tracking analysis shouldn’t be limited to those with extensive programming knowledge, and ezTrack is a nice alternative to currently available software that may require a bit more programming experience. The manuscript and Jupyter notebooks are written in the style of a tutorial, and is meant to provide straightforward instructions to the user on implementing ezTrack. ezTrack is unique from other recent video analysis toolboxes in that this method does not use deep learning algorithms and thus does not require training sets for transfer learning.
ezTrack can be used to analyze rodent behavior videos of a single animal in different settings, and the authors provide examples of positional analysis across several tasks (place-preference, water-maze, open-field, elevated plus maze, light-dark boxes, etc), as well as analysis of freezing behavior. ezTrack can provide frame-by-frame data output in .csv files, and users can crop the frames of the video to get rid of any issue with cables from optogenetic or electrophysiology experiments. ezTrack can take on multiple different video formats, such as mpg1, wav, avi, and more.
Aside from the benefit of being open-source, there are several major advantages of ezTrack. Notably, the tool is user-friendly in that it is accessible to researchers with little to no programming background. The user does not need to make many adjustments to parameters of the toolbox, and the data can processed into interactive visualizations and is easily extractable in .csv files. ezTrack is both operating system and hardware independent and can be used across multiple platforms. Utilizing ipython/Jupyter Notebook allows researchers to easily replicate their analyses as well.
Check out their GitHub with more details on how to use ezTrack: https://github.com/denisecailab/ezTrack
OpenBehavior Feedback Survey
We are looking for your feedback to understand how we can better serve the community! We’re also interested to know if/how you’ve implemented some of the open-source tools from our site in your own research.
We would greatly appreciate it if you could fill out a short survey (~5 minutes to complete) about your experiences with OpenBehavior.
https://american.co1.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_0BqSEKvXWtMagqp
Thanks!