Extremely long inter-trial intervals

AurelieP

Hi,
We noticed at the beginning of this week that the inter-trial interval which used to be of a couple of secs now lasts up to several 10s of seconds. No change to the Matlab code was made. We are using BPod state machine r2.5 with one rotary encoder, one reward valve/lick sensor, another solenoid, and an Arduino board. Any ideas about what could be going on and how to fix the issue?
Thank you!

Josh

Hello Aurelie,

I'd try adding MATLAB's tic/toc statements to measure how much time it takes the lines of your protocol to execute. Once you've identified the line(s), it will be easier to understand the issue.

Please let me know what you find.

Thanks,
Josh

AurelieP

Hi Josh,

Thank you for your input.
I managed to find and fix the issue, hopefully for good.

I identified a faulty circuit that lead to generating signals for Ports 1 and 2 at high frequency all throughout the trials. As a result Port1In, Port1Out, Port2In and Port2Out were quite long vectors, which significantly slowed down the addition of RawEvents to the Data .mat file ( BpodSystem.Data = AddTrialEvents(BpodSystem.Data, RawEvents);).