Shuttle Drive
- Alex Leighton
IMPORTANT: The ShuttleDrive documentation has migrated to a new site – please visit Home — ShuttleDrive Docs for up-to-date information.
Description
This design is the successor to the flexDrive. and has improved build speed, robustness, size, and drive stability and linearity.
The implant weighs approximately 2 grams, so it can be used in freely moving mice. The small size and low center of gravity of the design also makes it possible to target off-center areas, or even to fit a drive implant under a microscope for simultaneous imaging and electrophysiology.
The flexible recording array geometry allows recordings from multiple brain areas. Individual lowering of each electrode makes it possible to hit deep and small targets.
The drive is easy to build, two or three drives can be built per day even with relatively little training. It accommodates arbitrary spatial arrangements of electrodes, and is compatible with a variety of recording systems.
Features
Channel count: 18 drives, up to 64 channels per drive.
Weight: ~2g for 16 tetrode drives.
Build time: < 1 day.
Travel distance: 4.5 mm
Fully enclosed mechanism
Low center of gravity
Easy and fast to assemble
Drive parts, tools, and accessories can be purchased from our online store.
Drive Components
The drive consists of the following components:
A 3d printed drive body
3d printed drive shuttles
Polymide guide tubes
Polymicro shuttle tubes
These components can be purchased as bundle on our store.
Custom screws (reusable), and
Guide tube material, and.
Electrode interface boards (for 64ch or 32ch omnetics headstages )
.. are available on our store.
To assemble the drive, an assembly jig, and some other tools are needed (also on the store).
Assembly jig
Custom screwdriver
Building drives just got easy
Multiple innovative features make this drive design faster to build than any previous designs.
Even with little training, drives can be built from scratch in a few hours, and thanks to the new tetrode twister, making the electrodes is not a significant factor any longer. The main remaining step that takes up time is loading and gold-pinning the tetrodes - for that step you still need steady hands and some time.
Video shows construction of 4 drive mechanisms and loading of a tetrode
Citing the ShuttleDrive
When using the Open Ephys shuttle drive implants, please cite the paper:
Jakob Voigts, Jonathan P. Newman, Matthew A. Wilson, Mark T. Harnett (2019). An easy-to-assemble, robust, and lightweight drive implant for chronic tetrode recordings in freely moving animals
https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/746651v1