A major Bpod software update is ready

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Thursday, 13-Oct-22 19:43:53 PDT

Introducing Bpod Console v1.7

Since last October, Bpod users have been hard at work pushing the frontier of brain science with dozens of new publications. We've been hard at work too, evolving Bpod hardware and software to meet emerging needs: a larger user community, a more volatile supply chain, and support for new acquisition tools. Bpod console v1.7, its companion FSM Firmware v23 and our new state machine r2.5 answer these challenges with a wide array of new features, fixes and improvements.

The full scope of changes in v1.7 is given in the release notes, here. Some highlights are:

  • An improved firmware loading tool. The latest firmware for any state machine or module can be loaded with a few clicks. Roll-back to previous firmware versions is now supported.
  • Support for FSM firmware v23. The latest firmware improves incrementally on v22 with reduced dead-time, full support for implicit serial messages, more detailed hardware version information and a new TTL synchronization scheme. On FSM r2 or newer, an additional USB serial port is now available to exchange event codes directly with an external application on the same PC. Firmware v22 is still fully supported.
  • Support for Windows 11. Serial port auto-discovery no longer depends on Wmic, a discontinued windows interface.
  • Improved USB data transfer. ArCOM previously routed data via PsychToolbox's IOPort class. On MATLAB r2019b and newer, MATLAB's new serialport class is used by default. An improved buffering system complements the reworked serial interface to provide vastly improved immunity to CPU load.
  • Anaconda integration. New classes are provided to launch an anaconda application in a target environment from the MATLAB command line, and to exchange bytes with the resulting process (via TCP/IP on localhost). This capability paves the way for integration with an emerging array of Python tools for behavior characterization with machine vision.

With these improvements and many more, Bpod Console v1.7 is a worthwhile update that solves technical challenges to keep Bpod users focused on brain science. Especially for new research projects, we recommend trying it out.

Special thanks to Florian Rau in Poulet Lab at MDC Berlin for code contributions and beta testing of the new release!




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