Programming new Reiser panels (G3)

I think I've mentioned the 'panels' that Michael Reiser developed while he was in Michael Dickinson's lab. These are widely used, but programming them can be a bit difficult and tedious. (By program, I mean upload the firmware to the panels themselves, not simply changing the address, which can be done easily over serial.) Will Dickson at iorodeo.com recently wrote a great little collection of shell scripts to make this process easier.

You will need a panel controller box, the panels you want to program, and an avrisp mkII.

First, plug the mkII usb into your computer and the female header side into the six-pin header on the front of the controller box:


Make sure to align the small arrow on the avrisp mkII with the arrow on the header:


Next, plug a panel face-up into the female header:



Now, download and unzip the scripts from Will's bitbucket site. In a terminal, cd into the iorodeo-panels_prog_avrdude/program directory. Finally, run

./program_panel <address>


(The first time, this might require your password.)
Note <address> is the panel address you want to assign to the panel in HEX. That's right, you need to convert to hex from decimal. To do this conversion, I use an interactive python prompt and the following:

import numpy as np
np.set_printoptions(formatter={'int':lambda x:hex(int(x))})
print <address in decimal>


Little change to Panel_com

I just realized that I get annoyed every time I make a pattern and have to watch as the x- and y- indices scroll past as the Make_pattern_vector.m loops. So I changed lines ~58-62 from


for index_x = 1:NumPatsX
 for index_y = 1:NumPatsY
  [ index_x index_y ]


to

['x progress ',char(61)*ones(1,40)]
for index_x = 1:NumPatsX
 [char(8)*ones(1,10+51),'x progress ',char(62)*ones(1,round(index_x*40/NumPatsX)),char(61)*ones(1,round(40-index_x*40/NumPatsX))]
  for index_y = 1:NumPatsY


Setting up Python PControl

These are my notes on setting up Python PControl:

Install mercurial via synaptic

cd src
hg clone https://bitbucket.org/willdickson/panel_comm
cd panel_comm
sudo python setup.py install

gain and offset values in Panel_com

Using the default function value, the actual number of frames per second when using the command line interface (not the GUI) in open loop is given by: actual_speed = gain + 2.5*offset;