Safe USB to StimTracker Duo Usage for Timing Validation

Hardware General
1

Hello everyone,

I hope all is well! I am currently working on a project where we are validating physical audio and visual onsets of an experiment using a StimTracker Duo. We will not be sending any triggers to an EEG or recording system. The setup in theory would strictly be the laptop running the experiment (with PsychoPy tools), light and audio inputs into StimTracker using a photodiode and external soundcard, and a USB A connection between the laptop and StimTracker.

Our concern is if any part of this setup may interfere or alter with other experimenters that use StimTracker for its usual EEG purposes. We were told specifically that the USB connection is usually just as input, which would differ in our 2-way usage. We plan on sending commands such as a timer reset to StimTracker, and take back into the laptop timings of audio/visual onsets detected by StimTracker. The runtime commands we plan on using are e5 for the timer, iuA1 for the USB light sensor output, and iuL/R1 for the USB audio output.

So to summarize, do we have to worry about anything that may alter other experiments? Please let me know if there is any other information about our situation you may need.

Best,

Anmar

2

As you noted, by default StimTracker does not send time-stamped output via USB.

Whether you will interfere with your colleagues’ experiments depends entirely up to you. :grinning_face: If you are going to send an iuA1 command at the beginning of the experiment, make sure to always be sending an iuA0 command at the end.