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Hardware & parts list

Work in progress

This list was put together from the software and the lab notes. No complete bill of materials with part numbers exists yet. Rows marked TBD need a builder to fill them in. See Contributing.

Per box

Qty Item Notes
1 Laser-cut enclosure, 1/4 in (6 mm) acrylic ~6 ft² of sheet per box. Cut list
1 Bpod State Machine (r2 recommended) Sanworks. The code supports r0.5, r0.7–0.9 and r2.0. New units currently need a firmware downgrade; see why
3 Nose-pokes with IR beam, cue LED and water spout Sanworks port + port interface board, or your own. They mount in the 2.00 in openings
3 Solenoid valves (one per port) Driven by the Bpod port interface boards. TBD: model
3 Bpod port interface boards + cables Sanworks
1 USB cable to the control computer Each Bpod is identified by its USB serial number
— Mounting screws for the nose-pokes The 0.177 in holes fit #8 / M4. TBD: length
— Fasteners for the corner holes The 0.265 in holes fit 1/4 in / M6. TBD: rods or standoffs, length
opt. USB camera (UVC) Any OpenCV-compatible camera. Recorded by BpodAcademy

Water system (per rack)

Item Notes
Reservoir, ≥ 4 L Filled weekly with 10 % sucrose (Weekly maintenance)
Tubing + Y-connectors Reservoir → valves. Keep a spare set so you can swap in clean tubing each week. TBD: tubing ID
Tubing clamps For changing lines without spills
Syringe For priming the lines

Per rack / academy

Qty Item Notes
1 per ~8 boxes Control computer ≥ 8 cores/16 threads, ≥ 32 GB RAM, 2 × 1 TB SSD RAID 1. Details
— Powered USB hubs If the computer has fewer USB ports than boxes
1 Rack / shelving TBD
opt. 1 Teensy 3.2 camera-sync board Takes TTL from up to 13 Bpods. BpodAcademy → Cameras
1 Lab network storage (NAS) Nightly data copy
1 MySQL / DataJoint server We use AWS RDS. Data pipeline

Box designs in use

The database (bpod.BoxDesign) knows three layouts:

Design Layout Used by
3-port Left, center and right nose-pokes on one wall Flashes, FlashCount, Probabilities, … (this is the design in the cut files)
6-port Two rows of 3 nose-pokes TwoStep
lever-port A lever on the left and a nose-poke on the right TimingTask

Software licenses you need

  • MATLAB (one license per control computer). Add the Parallel Computing Toolbox if your protocols use asynchronous saving.
  • Everything else is free and open source (Bpod GPL-3.0, Python, DataJoint, Ubuntu).