Physio-psth
-----------

This is a small program to read neural spike data from an analogue source and do
some simple analysis on it. It was developed to read and display data from Tobi
Delbrücks neuromorphic analog VLSI retina/simple cell chip
(http://http://www.ini.uzh.ch/~tobi/friend/). This compilation proved to be a
nice setup for classroom demonstrations.

For data acquisition, the comedi library (http://www.comedi.org/) is used, so
any comedi device may be used to fetch the data. It has been tested with the
USB-DUX (http://www.linux-usb-daq.co.uk/).

For other drivers, the function MainWindow::timerEvent(QTimerEvent *) in
physio.cpp has to be modified to reflect the number of channels and precision of
the device.


License
-------

This piece of software is released under the GNU General Public License.

http://www.gnu.org/licenses/licenses.html#GPL

So please go ahead and modify/extend it.


Installation
------------

You need the following libraries to compile and run the program:

Comedi: http://www.comedi.org/download.php
Qt4: http://qt.nokia.com/downloads/downloads#qt-lib
Qwt5: http://qwt.sourceforge.net/

Once all libraries are up and running, have a look at "physio_psth.pro" and
modify it.

Then run "qmake", which should generate a Makefile and "make" to compile
everything. To finally run the program, you MUST have a comedi device installed.


Running
-------

Start the program with "./physio_psth". The top plot shows the raw data. On the
bottom, a PSTH may be plotted.

The parameters for the PSTH can be specified in the "PSTH parameters" box on the
left. In the "PSTH recording" box, a specific number of stimulus
repetitions/cycles can be specified.

The "print PSTH" button generates a postscript file of the bottom plot that may
be sent to the printer or saved. "save PSTH" saves the PSTH data as ASCII file
for later use with gnuplot.

Contact
-------

This program was written by Matthias Hennig. Contact me at:

Matthias H. Hennig
Department of Psychology
University of Stirling
Stirling
FK9 4LA
Scotland, UK
Phone: +44 01786 466379, Fax: +44 01786 467641
hennig@cn.stir.ac.uk

Bug fixes by Bernd Porr, BerndPorr@f2s.com, in 2005