Hello,
We’re using a Lumina LSC-400B controller (ASCII mode) with a serial-to-usb adapter to our stimulus machine and been having some issues with picking up triggers and responses from the cedrus response box in psychopy.
Is there a way to set up the controller to emulate a keypress that can be picked up by psychopy?
Thanks in advance,
Darya
The LSC-400B was superseded over 10 years ago by the newer Lumina 3G controller.
See this LSC-400B support note, Connecting to the fMRI Scanner’s Trigger. By setting a couple of switches, you can have the controller detect fMRI scanner triggers that are much shorter in duration. This will still not work if the controller is in “Lumina” mode because the controller is too slow for that mode, but you are using the ASCII mode anyway.
The LSC-400B cannot emulate a keyboard keypress; the newer Lumina 3G controller does have a built-in Keyboard mode.
Last tidbit: what serial-to-usb adapter model are you using? the only one we recommend is the USB-COM-U13 from Saelig.
Thanks for your response.
I’ve managed to pick up a trigger to start my task using pyserial. We’re using a goobay usb-to-serial adapter with a mac OS.
I’m still unable to record button presses on Lumina LS-pair as it seems to interfere with stimulus presentation. I saw here that using xid I should be able to log presses more accurately - is this possible to do with LSC-400B?
If you use XID commands directly, you can get time-stamped keypress information. But scanner triggers will not come through if you are using the built-in pulse extender that I mentioned earlier.
If you get the Saelig adapter, you will be able to use our pyxid2 library instead of handling the XID commands directly, and get better timing.
Can I use the XID commands with the controller set to ASCII mode? (in which case getting the scanner trigger seems to work)
No. The XID commands work only when the controller is in Lumina mode.