More than 256 states on Bpod r1

kinon

Is there a way of getting Bpod r1 to register more than 256 states? We are using 8 behavior ports, and the experiment uses the port lights to indicate reward availability - once a reward is claimed, the light turns off. As you can imagine, this requires adding states accounting for many combinations of lit and unlit ports, which quickly exceed 256.

Changing the max state value in firmware doesn't seem to work. Are we limited by hardware, then?
In that case, can we use the behavior ports with another controller?

Josh

Hello Kinon,

Unfortunately the r1's RAM is the limitation.
You can get around this issue in your protocol by using global timers.
A global timer can control a port LED as in this example.
In your setup, each of the 8 behavior ports would be linked to a separate global timer.
You can trigger any subset of the timers from a single state using the following syntax:
{'GlobalTimerTrig', '11001010'}
The binary string indicates which timers to trigger.
You'd then cancel the timers as each reward is claimed with:
{'GlobalTimerCancel', N}
where N is the port number.

This example shows something similar to what you'd develop. The first state triggers three timers which begin flashing port LEDs. Poking into port 1 will turn off its flashing LED, and unlike in your case, poking into port 2 would exit the trial. Since you don't need flashing, you'd set 'Duration' to 3600s and 'Loop' to 0.

Please let me know if this works!

Thanks
Josh