Monitoring Experiments

In any operational mode, Maestro's user interface process and its RTX-based hardware controller communicate with each other frequently over an interprocess shared memory object. The GUI "master" process sends commands over the shared memory, along with target, trial, and stimulus run definitions. The hardware controller, in turn, responds to the various commands and runs experimental protocols in accordance with the information read from shared memory. In addition, the controller writes a lot of useful information back to the user interface side: operational state information and protocol results, status/error messages, current eye and fixation target positions, and the analog and digital data collected during runtime. Users monitor the progress of an experiment by viewing this runtime data and information in four different output panels.

Like the mode control panel, all of these display panels can be docked to one edge of the frame window, floated in a separate window on top of the frame, resized, or hidden altogether -- so users can monitor as much or as little of the runtime data as they wish. For the most part, they are simple readout displays requiring little, if any, interaction from the user.

The following sections describe each of the display/output panels available in Maestro:

• • The Message Log panel: Status information and error messages displayed here and optionally logged to a text file.

  • The Eye-Target Position panel: An X-Y plot showing the relative positions of the eye and selected targets.

  • The Data Traces panel: Plots analog and digital event data recorded in Trial or Continuous mode, in accordance with a specified channel configuration.

  • The Spike Histograms panel: Accumulates and renders spike-time histograms for all tagged sections defined in the set of trials currently being sequenced in Trial mode.