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Any data coming in through the digital inputs of the acquisition board/evaluation board will be saved as events in the all_channels.events file (when using Open Ephys data format) or the KWIK file (when using Kwik format). There will be one event when a channel goes "high," and another when it goes "low." This will happen automatically, there is no configuration necessary. It's not currently possible to disable event saving for particular channels; anything that comes in on the 8 digital inputs will be saved.
USB 3 (XEM6310-LX45) board support
We've added support for the newer USB FPGA boards, making it possible to acquire data frmo up to 512 channels. If you plan to use a USB3 board, keep in mind the following recommendations and known issues:
- USB3 acquisition is currently fully tested on Windows. It might still not work properly on Linux or Mac (check additional note for Linux users).
- Plugging an USB3 board on a USB2 port can result on strange behaviours. At the very least, it won't enforce the 256 channel limit as it does with an USB2 board.
- You'll need a fairly powerful machine to be able to acquire 512 channels (Intel i7 at 3.4GHz or equivalent with an SSD disk are recommended).
- The only supported format for writing large amounts of channels is the HDF5 based Kwik format. Since "Open ephys" format opens a file for each channel it can cause a crash when recording a high channel count.
- If the CPU load indicator in the GUI reachs 100%, even if it's in a spiking manner, double check your data timestamps for possible missing blocks.
- Due to the high load caused by 512 channel acquisition and recording, we do not recommend running any extra online analysis or processing apart from basic visualization, as it is easy to overload the CPU, causing data loss.
Linux users and USB3 boards
Due to the newer libokFrontPanel.so libraries, needed for USB3 support, are linked to libudev0 and Ubuntu 14.04 and onwards only supply libudev1 we're supplying both it and the older, USB2 only, library files. The latter is the default one located on the Resources/DLLs folder. The USB3-capable libraries are under Resources/DLLs/Linux-usb3. To use them just copy them to the executable folder.
If you're using Ubuntu 14 and want to test USB3 support without downgrading there is a workaround consisting on creating a softlink to libudev1 mimicking the libudev0 path. This can be done by the command "sudo ln -s /lib/[i386 or x86_64]-linux-gnu/libudev.so.1 /lib/[i386 or x86_64]-linux-gnu/libudev.so.0", using i386 or x86_64 depending on your architecture. Keep in mind that this is a very hackish approach and can cause unknown inestabilities on your system.