NI-DAQmx

Streams analog and digital data from National Instruments (NI) hardware. Use multiple instances of this plugin to acquire data from several PXI-, PCI-, and/or USB-based NI devices simultaneously. Can be used in tandem with the Neuropix-PXI plugin, to read in analog and digital inputs in parallel with Neuropixels data.

Installation (currently Windows only)

This plugin can be added via the Open Ephys GUI's built-in Plugin Installer. Press ctrl-P or ⌘P to open the Plugin Installer, browse to "NI-DAQmx", and click the "Install" button. The NI-DAQmx plugin should now be available to use.

Usage

Instructions for using the NI-DAQmx Plugin are available here.

Important Note: Syncing analog and digital channels only works with NI devices that support correlated (hardware-timed) digital I/O (see docs above).

Building from source

First, follow the instructions on this page to build the Open Ephys GUI.

Important: This plugin is intended for use with the latest version of the GUI (0.6.0 and higher). The GUI should be compiled from the main branch, rather than the former master branch.

Then, clone this repository into a directory at the same level as the plugin-GUI, e.g.:

Code
├── plugin-GUI
│   ├── Build
│   ├── Source
│   └── ...
├── OEPlugins
│   └── ni-daqmx
│       ├── Build
│       ├── Source
│       └── ...

Windows

Driver Installation You must first install the NI-DAQmx drivers from here

Requirements: Visual Studio and CMake

From the Build directory, enter:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 ..

Next, launch Visual Studio and open the OE_PLUGIN_ni-daqmx-plugin.sln file that was just created. Select the appropriate configuration (Debug/Release) and build the solution.

Selecting the INSTALL project and manually building it will copy the .dll and any other required files into the GUI's plugins directory. The next time you launch the GUI from Visual Studio, the new plugin should be available.

Attribution

This plugin was created by Pavel Kulik at the Allen Institute for Neural Dynamics.

If you need help getting this plugin to work with your hardware, please contact Pavel at pavel@open-ephys.org.