pyControl data storage

[juan-cobos]

We recently acquired a pyControl board with some OpenEphys peripherals for behavioral experiments. I'm configuring our setup and I had some troubles extracting the data. After reading the documentation, there seems to be an automatic way to save the data https://pycontrol.readthedocs.io/en/latest/user-guide/pycontrol-data/
However, after running the experiment's script and making sure peripherals are detected, the sd card and the micropython filesystem are empty, so I don't know where it's supposed to store it.

To run experiment's scripts I use the remote option from micropython (https://store.micropython.org/product/PYBv1.1) using pyboard.py from terminal, such as:

python pyboard.py <your_protocol.py>

Thus, I don't know if there is any default saving system but I couldn't find it. In case there is none, I would suggest to create one. For instance, whenever hardware_definition is imported, try to detect connected peripherals or declared variables for which to store its values. Furthermore, it would be cool to always look for sd card in the microcontroller or even pyserial communication with the computer connected to the pycontrol, where to store/send the data. Last option could also be used to sync video settings, plots, closed-loop experiments... in your PC while running experiment scripts in the pycontrol.

Looking forward your comments. I'd be happy to contribute developing those changes.

Juan

[ThomasAkam]

Hi @juan-cobos,

The standard way to run experiment with pyControl is using the pyControl GUI (see the docs here). When you run an experiment using the GUI the data generated is saved on the computer running the GUI, in the folder specified when you configure the experiment in the GUI's Experiments tab.

Thomas