This plugin for the Open Ephys GUI fires a TTL event when a specified input data channel crosses a specified threshold level; the criteria for detection and the output are highly customizable. It does not modify the data channels. Each instance only processes one data channel, but multiple instances can be chained together or placed in parallel.

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• Basic operation: When the In data channel Rises and/or Falls across the Threshold level, an event turns on on the Out event channel.

• Timeout controls the minimum time between two consecutive events (i.e. for this number of milliseconds after an event fires, no more crossings can be detected).

• Threshold type:

  • Constant is the default.

  • "Optimize correlated indicator from event channel" (adaptive): This allows you to use a simple optimization algorithm to automatically adjust the threshold. Given a binary event channel, it assumes that the values of events from this channel are correlated with the threshold, and adjusts the threshold according to the learning rate to try to move the event values closer to the specified target. See the tooltips on each setting for more information.

  • Random (chooses a new threshold for each event, uniformly at random within the provided range)

  • Continuous channel (compared with the input channel sample-by-sample to identify crossings)

• Event criteria:

  • Cross-threshold jump size limit (does not fire an event if the difference across threshold is too large in magnitude; useful for filtering out wrapped phase jumps, for example)

  • Sample voting (make detection more robust to noise by requiring a larger span of samples before or after t0 to be on the correct side)

• Event duration (in ms)

This plugin can now be built outside of the main GUI file tree using CMake. In order to do so, it must be in a sibling directory to plugin-GUI* and the main GUI must have already been compiled.

If you are already using CMake to build the main GUI (in development as of writing), you should switch to the cmake-gui branch to get the compatible plugin CMake build file.

See CrossingDetector/CMAKE_README.txt and/or the wiki page here for build instructions.

* If you have the GUI built somewhere else, you can specify its location by setting the environment variable GUI_BASE_DIR or defining it when calling cmake with the option -DGUI_BASE_DIR=<location>.

This does not apply if you are using CMake to build the main GUI.

On all platforms:

• Copy crossing-detector/CrossingDetector/Source to plugin-GUI/Source/Plugins/CrossingDetector.

On Windows (VS2013):

• Copy crossing-detector/CrossingDetector/LegacyBuildVS2013 to plugin-GUI/Builds/VisualStudio2013/Plugins/CrossingDetector.

• In Visual Studio, open the Plugins.sln solution and add the new project (File->Add->Existing Project... and select Builds/VisualStudio2013/Plugins/CrossingDetector/CrossingDetector.vcxproj). Then build the solution.

On Linux, build the plugin by calling make -f Makefile.plugins from Builds/Linux as usual. You can specify the target to build just this plugin (call make -f Makefile.plugins CrossingDetector).

Currently maintained by Mark Schatza ([email protected])