[Neurodebian-upstream] [Neurodebian-devel] poster copy request

[Yury V. Zaytsev]

Hey!

Just saw you bounced half of your mailbox to the list and felt a sudden
urge to chime in...

On Fri, 2010-11-19 at 09:33 -0500, Yaroslav Halchenko wrote:

> Have you seen other interesting Linux-based RT electrophysiology
> acquisition/analysis projects at SfN10?

Disclaimer: I've NOT been to SfN.

It depends on what do you mean by realtime. I think a rough
classification would include "soft" realtime which can be achieved with
non-RT kernels and "hard" realtime which you can only achieve by using
the RT patchset and what follows.

>From what I know, there is a number of realtime EP acquisition systems
available under FOSS licences which have been around for quite some
time. Of course, there are also some commercial systems developed for a
very particular task or having some special hardware in mind.

There have recently been a small meeting of the developers of such
systems at my institution:

http://neuralensemble.org/trac/cole/wiki/COLE_2010

There is not so much to see there, but you can download the list of
participants and get an idea on who is involved.

I can mention at least three systems without doing any prior research:

1) NeurOnline (developed at my institution)
2) RELACS [1] appears to be the oldest out there
3) MEABench [2] more geared towards MEAs

The main goal of the meeting was to mitigate the NIH syndrome and
concentrate on developing common standardized components instead of keep
on re-inventing wheels of different calibers. 

[1]: http://relacs.sourceforge.net/
[2]: http://www.its.caltech.edu/~daw/meabench/

> It was our impression from SfN10, that there exist various very
> interesting but disjoint efforts which might  benefit greatly if forces
> get joined or at least centralized to some degree.  

This was our impression as well, hence COLE was created. 

I will forward the link to this thread to some of the attendants. Maybe
if they are interested they can join the discussion or otherwise just
have a look at it.

> On our hand we could help making Debian (and thus its derivatives such
>  as ubuntu) convenient out-of-the-box for such kind of research.

Well... I am not sure that apart from RELACS there is other software
that is so to say deployment-ready. From my experience, compilation and
installation is actually the least complicated part of getting the setup
running, what is really challenging is the configuration process.

Often, the hardware is working somehow differently depending on the
platform and you often need to re-compile after you figure out what the
differences are etc.

So in this sense I am not sure if the packages as such are going to be
of huge help, since it's generally easier for users to install to /opt
instead of learning how to rebuild the packages.

What would really need packaging in my opinion are libraries. Having all
dependencies and pre-requisites packaged would definitively help a lot. 

HTH,
 
-- 
Sincerely yours,
Yury V. Zaytsev