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Daily operation

Animals live in their boxes and train on their own. A daily check takes a few minutes per rack.

Start (or restart) the academy

conda activate bpod
bpodacademy
  1. Training → Load your saved configuration. It fills in the protocol, subject and settings for each box.
  2. Bpod → Start All, or Start Bpod box by box.
  3. Run Protocol on each box.

You can also check from your office or home (on campus/VPN) with bpodacademy --remote and the rig's IP address.

Daily checklist

  • Every box shows a running protocol in BpodAcademy
  • Animals look healthy; water is flowing (reservoir level dropped, no leaks)
  • Yesterday's performance looks normal (see below)
  • Weigh animals as your animal protocol requires and record the weights: dj-ratacad weight <rat> -d YYYY-MM-DD -w <grams>

Check yesterday's performance

conda activate dj
dj-ratacad summary flashes            # default: yesterday
dj-ratacad summary flashes -d 2026-10-01

Replace flashes with your task (flashcount, twostep, timingtask, probabilities, ufi).

What happens automatically

Time Where What
continuous each box Protocol runs; trials only start inside the protocol's time-of-day window. A new data file starts every 24 h.
01:00 each rig computer transferBpodData copies Bpod Local/Data to the NAS
02:00 one designated computer dj-ratacad update loads new NAS data into DataJoint (Data pipeline)
08:00 each rig computer updateProtocols pulls protocol changes from GitHub. Restart a protocol to pick up changes.

Starting a new animal

  1. Add the animal to the database (Data pipeline → Adding animals). Without this row, its data will never be ingested.
  2. In BpodAcademy: Subjects → Add Subject under the protocol, then give it a settings file (Settings → Copy Existing).
  3. Record a baseline weight: dj-ratacad weight <rat> -d <date> -w <g> -b.
  4. Select the subject for the box and Run Protocol.