Installation

Maestro is a Windows application that communicates with two or more hardware devices installed in the host system. Through these peripheral devices the program controls a variety of target stimulus platforms and other external equipment in the laboratory apparatus, and records the subject's behavioral and neuronal responses during an experiment. Framebuffer video requires a separate program, RMVideo, running on a separate Linux workstation and connected to the Maestro PC via a point-to-point network connection (isolated from any local area network).

To satisfy real-time performance demands, the Maestro software installation requires the Real-Time Extension (RTX) package from IntervalZero, Inc. RTX acts as a real-time subsystem (RTSS) within the Windows operating system and offers kernel-level access to peripheral devices. Maestro's hardware controller runs within the RTSS subsystem and can thus talk directly to all supported hardware, simplifying the software installation since there's no need to install OEM drivers for each device.

Integration of the EyeLink 1000+ eye tracker with Maestro (release 3.2.0) departs from this paradigm. The EyeLink API that is required to communicate with the tracker is not available for the RTX environment, so we had to develop a Win32-based worker thread to handle that communication and service the 1HKz pupil data stream whenever recording was in progress. Fortunately, this was not an issue with the quad-core (or better) workstations that run Maestro in the laboratory; with two or more cores dedicated to Win32, the Maestro GUI remains responsive even when the EyeLink service thread is polling pupil data every millisecond.

Explore this chapter further for a description of the external laboratory apparatus (signal conditioning modules, breakout panels for analog and digital signals, and so on), a list of supported plug-in PC cards and their roles, and detailed installation procedures.