OpenEphys Installation - nimh-nif/SCNI_Toolbar GitHub Wiki

The following guide is intended for SCNI lab members, but may be of some use to other Open Ephys users.

For quick tests, executables of the Open Ephys GUI can be directly downloaded from the official website: http://www.open-ephys.org/gui/. However, below the download links they recommend:

”To make sure you always have the most up-to-date version, or to make your own updates to the software, we recommend building the GUI from source. Follow the instructions here to learn to how to fork our repository and keep it in sync. The steps involved in compilation will depend on your platform, so be sure to read up on how to build the GUI on Mac, Linux, and Windows. See our list of releases for an overview of when new major features were added.”

As of 2018, the SCNI uses Windows PCs (SCNI-XXX-NeuroPhys) for neurophysiological data acquisition, since it is the only operating system supported by TDT. Instructions for building the Open Ephys GUI on Windows provided by Josh Siegle (https://open-ephys.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/OEW/pages/491621/Windows) are as follows:

1. Create a GitHub account if you haven't already.
2. While logged into your account, go to https://github.com/open-ephys/plugin-GUI and click the "Fork" button in the upper right. You now have your own copy of the GUI repository. Any changes you make will only affect this copy. (More info on forking here.)
3. Make sure you have GitHub for Windows installed.
4. Install Microsoft Visual Studio 2013 if you haven't already.
5. Direct your browser to https://github.com/yourusername/plugin-GUI, where "yourusername" is replaced by your actual GitHub user name.
6. Click the "Clone in Desktop" button.
7. Run GUI/Resources/DLLs/FrontPanelUSB-DriverOnly-4.4.0.exe to install the acquisition board driver. This driver should be compatible with Windows 7, 8 and 8.1, but seems to work well on Windows 10 as well.
8. In Visual Studio, select the open-ephys.sln file from the GUI/Builds/VisualStudio2013 folder.
9. Hit the "Debug" button to build the GUI from source.
10. Copy GUI/Resources/Bitfiles/rhd2000.bit to the Debug/bin folder created by Visual Studio

1. The GUI must be compiled prior to the plugins, as the plugin build process needs the open-ephys.lib file created by doing so in its default directory.

2. Open the VS solution file Builds\Visualstudio2013\Plugins\Plugins.sln

3. Select the appropiate architecture and release mode that matches the one the GUI was built with.

4. Either build the complete solution to generate all plugins or build specific projects to compile individual plugins. Installing the eCube API will allow you to build the eCube plugin without errors. Depending on the version of Windows, you may still see some errors that can be fixed by manually registering the DLL in a command prompt with admin rights:

   cd \Windows\SysWOW64 regSvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\EcubeAPI\ecubeapi32.dll" regSvr32 "C:\Program Files (x86)\EcubeAPI\ecubeapi64.dll"

5. If you would now like to have a "built and unchanging" version of the GUI, e.g. for other users of the machine/rig, copy the contents of the "Release" or "Release64" folder to an appropriate spot on your Desktop, in the Program Files folder, etc. You will also need to copy over the "Resources" folder from the source download, which includes things like the bitfile that needs to be downloaded to the FPGA. Now you can both use the GUI and make changes to the source code. We recommend reading through the developer documentation before doing so. NOTE: The debug version of the GUI runs really slowly on Windows. If you're doing any actual data acquisition, you should build the release version instead, which runs smoothly. Any changes you commit can be synced with your GitHub repository through the GitHub application or from the command line. If you change something that you think would be useful for others, you can submit a pull request to the Open Ephys version of the GUI.

To build the 64 bit Windows version of the GUI

• Either of the 64bit configurations (Debug64 or Release64) must be selected. "Release|x64" will build, but then the Plugins will not. "Release64|x64"  will.
• BUT, when building the Plugins, "Release64|x64" will not be available, and you will choose "Release|x64" instead.
• x64 architecture must me selected either from the configuration manager or the "Solution Platforms" combo box (if enabled in your workspace).
• The binaries will be placed on a different folder than their 32bit counterparts

An example circuit for basic recording of 128 channels of LFP, 8 ADC channels, network events, and online spike sorting, can be found on Nifstorage in /projects/SCNI/OpenEphys/Circuits/.

According to Aaron Cuevas (core technical support at Open Ephys):

“There is a known issue with the network event module in which it creates a default "dummy" channel set to record by default which will cause the GUI to crash when recording.” (GoogleGroups)

The solution is to deselect that channel from recording. Figure 2 lists the steps required for disabling this dummy channel in the GUI.

As of 2018, all visual stimulus presentation PCs (SCNI-XXX-DataPixx) used in the SCNI are running Ubuntu 16.04, Matlab R2016a (or later), and are used to control stimulus presentation and timing using the DataPixx2 hardware and PsychToolbox extensions. In order for these PCs to communicate with the Open Ephys GUI running on the neurophysiology PC, it is necessary to install ZeroMQ.

• https://open-ephys.atlassian.net/wiki/display/OEW/Linux
• https://github.com/open-ephys/GUI/tree/master/Resources/Matlab
• http://zeromq.org/intro:get-the-software

• Make sure that libtool, pkg-config, build-essential, autoconf, and automake are installed:

  sudo apt-get install libtool pkg-config build-essential autoconf automake
  sudo apt-get install libzmq-dev
  
  

• Check whether uuid-dev package, uuid/e2fsprogs RPM or equivalent on your system is installed:

• Unpack the .tar.gz source archive.

  ./configure
  make
  
  

• To install ZeroMQ system-wide and see configuration options:

  sudo make install
  sudo ldconfig
  ./configure --help
  
  

To build from master on Linux and OS/X, in a terminal type:

git clone https://github.com/zeromq/libzmq
./autogen.sh && ./configure && make -j 4
make check && make install && sudo ldconfig

• Clone (or copy from the Open Ephys directory) the Open EPhys GUI Matlab tools folder: https://github.com/open-ephys/GUI/tree/master/Resources/Matlab

• In Matlab:

   compile_matlab_wrapper.m