receiving events from bonsai by softcode

chris

Hi Josh,

I have some problems with connecting bonsai to bpod. Bonsai was set to send '5' by softcode to bpod to trigger water once mouse reentered a specific area.
1) the number of 'softcode' is not stable after reopening Matlab and reconnecting bonsai. Sometimes, 'softcode1' event was detected in bpod while 'softcode6' event was detected in other times. Generally, how to receive any type of data (like float) in bpod besides integer? I found 'ReadOscByte.m' in bpod, but have no idea how to use it during running state machine.

2) Is it doable to run two Bpod (opening two Matlab programs) and bonsai programs at the same time and connect the two pairs using different ports? Will the 'softcode' data stream interfere with each other between different pairs of bonsai-bpod?

   sma = AddState(sma, 'Name', 'DetectStay', ...
        'Timer', 0, ...
        'StateChangeConditions', {'SoftCode6', 'OpenTube'}, ...
        'OutputActions', {});
    
    
    sma = AddState(sma, 'Name', 'OpenTube', ...
        'Timer', RewardAmount, ...
        'StateChangeConditions', {'Tup', 'exit'}, ...
        'OutputActions', openSpout);

Thanks,
Lei

Josh

Hi Lei,

Can you please send the Bonsai workflow file and the OSC config file you're using to support@sanworks.io?

The current integration only allows integers, because the incoming bytes are mapped to soft codes and only soft codes 1-15 are valid.
What would you want to do on the MATLAB side with a float received from Bonsai?

ReadOSCByte.m is used to extract bytes from OSC packets, which are required by Bonsai's TCP interface.
OSC packets are sent by Bonsai to a port on localhost, and read out by MATLAB. Since there is only one port for all instances of MATLAB, bytes intended for separate instances would get mingled. Bonsai integration has to be re-worked anyway because it had relied on some undocumented Java features that don't work properly with the newest versions of MATLAB - so I'll add support for multiple instances in the next update.

-Josh

chris

H Josh,

Thanks for the quick response.

Right now, I was just writing a simple Bonsai workflow to test whether it is doable to send Bpod a message when mice left a specific region to trigger Bpod state machine to the next state for detecting lick. After the mice licked, the water port will open and the open duration was also sent by Bonsai decided by how long the mice stayed in the designated region. Therefore, I need to send the open duration, which is a float, to Bpod from Bonsai. It seems impossible to set the 'Timer' of a 'State' by bytes received from other programs.

As for running multiple instances of Bonsai and Bpod (in different instances of Matlab), I found that the bytes sent by Bonsai workflow was not actually mixed during different paired of Bonsai-Bpod, probably due to I connected each pair using different ports for each communication.

Lei

Josh

Hi Lei,

You could have Bonsai send a byte (e.g. '1') on entering a zone, and a second byte (e.g. '2') on leaving. The state machine receives these as soft codes with reasonably low latency. The state machine can't make a future state depend on the length of a previous state during the same trial, but you can discretize the problem and use lots of states, e.g.

State 1: Wait for Bonsai byte
State 2: Wait 100ms. If byte 2 arrives, go to Reward1 (the smallest reward). If not, goto State3
State3: Wait for 100ms. If byte 2 arrives, go to Reward2 (a slightly larger reward). If not, goto State 4
...
State 100: Wait for byte 2, then goto Reward100 (the largest reward)

I hope this helps,
-Josh

chris

Hi Josh,

I think that is a good compromised solution, I will definitely try it.

Thanks,
Lei