Background

The development of new high throughput approaches for neuroscience such as high-density silicon probes and 2-photon imaging have led to a renaissance in visual neuroscience. However, generating the stimuli needed to evoke activity in the visual system still represents a non-negligible difficulty for experimentalists. While several widely used software toolkits exist to deliver such stimuli, they all suffer from some shortcomings. Primarily, the hardware needed to effectively display such stimuli comes at a significant financial cost, and secondly, triggering and/or timing the stimuli such that it can be accurately synchronized with other devices requires the use of legacy hardware, further hardware, or bespoke solutions.

Results

Here we present RPG (Raspberry Pi Gratings), a Python package written for the Raspberry Pi, which overcomes these issues. Specifically, the Raspberry Pi is a low-cost, credit card sized computer with general purpose input/output pins, allowing RPG to be triggered to deliver stimuli and to provide real-time feedback on stimulus timing. RPG delivers stimuli at 60 frames per second and the feedback of frame timings is accurate to 10 s of microseconds.

Comparison with Existing Method(s)

With respect to the accuracy of frame timings, the performance of RPG is at least as accurate as commonly used packages. However, the inbuilt ability to trigger stimuli and the real-time feedback of frame timings will be extremely useful for certain experiments.

Conclusions

RPG provides a simple to use Python interface that is capable of generating drifting sine wave gratings, Gabor patches and displaying raw images/video.

中文翻译：

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RPG：一种低成本、开源、高性能的视觉刺激显示解决方案

背景

新的高通量神经科学方法的发展，如高密度硅探针和 2 光子成像，导致了视觉神经科学的复兴。然而，产生唤起视觉系统活动所需的刺激对于实验者来说仍然是一个不可忽视的困难。虽然存在几种广泛使用的软件工具包来提供这种刺激，但它们都存在一些缺点。首先，有效显示此类刺激所需的硬件需要付出巨大的财务成本，其次，触发和/或定时刺激以使其能够与其他设备准确同步需要使用传统硬件、进一步的硬件或定制解决方案.

结果

在这里，我们展示了 RPG（Raspberry Pi Gratings），这是一个为 Raspberry Pi 编写的 Python 包，它克服了这些问题。具体来说，Raspberry Pi 是一种低成本、信用卡大小的计算机，具有通用输入/输出引脚，允许触发 RPG 以提供刺激并提供有关刺激时间的实时反馈。RPG 以每秒 60 帧的速度提供刺激，帧计时的反馈精确到 10  s 微秒。

与现有方法的比较

就帧计时的准确性而言，RPG 的性能至少与常用软件包一样准确。然而，触发刺激的内置能力和帧时序的实时反馈对于某些实验非常有用。

结论

RPG 提供了一个简单易用的 Python 界面，能够生成漂移正弦波光栅、Gabor 补丁和显示原始图像/视频。