Precisely driving several devices from IgorPro through National Instruments board possible?

Posted by Ponti, Aaron on
URL: http://confocal-microscopy-list.275.s1.nabble.com/Precisely-driving-several-devices-from-IgorPro-through-National-Instruments-board-possible-tp4907273.html

Dear list

we would like to set up a system for behavioral experiments
(conditioning) with mice where several pieces of hardware should be
driven and, most importantly, precisely synchronized (at the few-ms
scale). We currently are thinking of using WaveMetrics Igor Pro the Igor
NIDAQ Tools MX to program the experiment protocols and then drive all
the hardware through a National Instruments NI PCI-6229 board.
In our setup, we would need to control (1) a laser through analog and
digital outputs (->aotf and ->ttl) to modulate the laser power and/or to
switch it on and off; (2) a sound source (digital), (3) a camera
(digital); and possibly other recordings.
Does anybody have any experience with using Igor Pro for this kind of
things? Is it possible to trigger all this hardware precisely? The laser
pulses will have down to 5ms period, is this time resolution possible at
all? Is it conceivable to be able to react to measurements, i.e. modify
the generated output signals on the fly in response to measured inputs?
Can you otherwise suggest other approaches?

Thanks a lot for any suggestions

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| Dr. Aaron C. Ponti
| Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research
| Facility for Advanced Microscopy and Imaging
| Image processing and analysis / software development
| Maulbeerstrasse 66 CH-4058, Basel
| WRO-1066.0.16
| Tel: [phone]
| Fax: [phone]
| http://www.fmi.ch/faim
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