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- Create a GitHub account if you haven't already.
- While logged into your account, go to https://github.com/open-ephys/plugin-GUI and click the "Fork" button in the upper right. You now have your own copy of the GUI repository. Any changes you make will only affect this copy. (More info on forking here.)
- Make sure you have GitHub for Windows installed.
- Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 if you haven't already.
- Direct your browser to https://github.com/yourusername/plugin-GUI, where "yourusername" is replaced by your actual GitHub user name.
- Click the "Clone in Desktop" button.
- Run GUI/ Resources/DLLs/FrontPanelUSB-DriverOnly-4.4.0.exe to install the acquisition board driver. This driver should be compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, but seems to work well on Windows 10 as well.
- In Visual Studio, select the open-ephys.sln file from the GUI/ Builds/VisualStudio2013 folder.
- Select Build/Build Solution (or press F6) to build the GUI from source or hit the "Debug" button to build and run.
- Copy GUI/ Resources/Bitfiles/rhd2000.bit to the Debug/bin folder created by Visual Studio
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- The GUI must be compiled prior to the plugins, as the plugin build process needs the open-ephys.lib file created by doing so in its default directory.
- Open the VS solution file Builds\Visualstudio2013\Plugins\Plugins.sln
- Select the appropiate architecture and release mode that matches the one the GUI was built with.
- Either build the complete solution to generate all plugins or build specific projects to compile individual plugins.
- If you would now like to have a "built and unchanging" version of the GUI, e.g. for other users of the machine/rig, copy the contents of the "Release" or "Release64" folder to an appropriate spot on your Desktop, in the Program Files folder, etc. You will also need to copy over the "Resources" folder from the source download, which includes things like the bitfile that needs to be downloaded to the FPGA.
Optional: The eCube plugin is not built by default
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. Mosts users won't need this plugin as it is for a specific devices, but in case you need it you must manually build its project. Installing the eCube API will allow you to build this plugin without errors. Depending on the version of Windows, you may still see some errors that can be fixed by manually registering the DLL in a command prompt with admin rights:
cd \Windows\SysWOW64regSvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\EcubeAPI\ecubeapi32.dll"regSvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\EcubeAPI\ecubeapi64.dll
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Now you can both use the GUI and make changes to the source code. We recommend reading through the developer documentation before doing so.
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