Fwd: Re: activewire button box

1
dear tim

no, i haven't heard anything.

thanks for the delcom tip.

best

denis

>Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:04:46 +1100
>From: Timothy Bates <tim@...>
>Subject: Re: activewire button box
>To: Christopher Taylor <taylorcp@...>, Denis Pelli
><denis.pelli@...>
>Original-recipient: rfc822;dp3@...
>
>Hi Denis,
>
>Christopher Taylor emailed me about the ActiveWire and reminded me of that
>guy some months (a year?) ago from ActiveWire who was looking to develop a
>millisecond button box. Did anything ever come of of it to your knowledge?
>
>Tim
>
>PS: We are anticipating using the <http://www.delcom-eng.com> board in
>PsyScript X. It seems to be gaining ground as it is already supported under
>X, is very cheap, and the developers are quite approachable.
>
>
>Dr Timothy Bates <mailto:tim@...>
>Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS)
>Macquarie University
>Ph 61 (2) 9850 8623
>Fx 61 (2) 9850 6059
2
Dennis & Tim:

I just ordered some cards from Eric at ActiveWire, & we did talk about
the possibility of ActiveWire building a box. He was interested in
hearing what sorts of specs (e.g., # of buttons, configuration, led
indicators) would be useful. It would be nice to hear some suggestions
from the psychtoolbox group. Also, the OSX support should be here any
day, he said.

I don't know anything about the delcom product, but I've been happy
with support & product from ActiveWire. As an additional plus, they're
developing what sound like very nice A-D & D-A boards -- at a *very*
reasonable price.

-tom

On Wednesday, Mar 26, 2003, at 17:54 US/Pacific, Denis Pelli wrote:

> dear tim
>
> no, i haven't heard anything.
>
> thanks for the delcom tip.
>
> best
>
> denis
>
>> Date: Thu, 27 Mar 2003 10:04:46 +1100
>> From: Timothy Bates <tim@...>
>> Subject: Re: activewire button box
>> To: Christopher Taylor <taylorcp@...>, Denis Pelli
>> <denis.pelli@...>
>> Original-recipient: rfc822;dp3@...
>>
>> Hi Denis,
>>
>> Christopher Taylor emailed me about the ActiveWire and reminded me of
>> that
>> guy some months (a year?) ago from ActiveWire who was looking to
>> develop a
>> millisecond button box. Did anything ever come of of it to your
>> knowledge?
>>
>> Tim
>>
>> PS: We are anticipating using the <http://www.delcom-eng.com> board in
>> PsyScript X. It seems to be gaining ground as it is already supported
>> under
>> X, is very cheap, and the developers are quite approachable.
>>
>>
>> Dr Timothy Bates <mailto:tim@...>
>> Macquarie Centre for Cognitive Science (MACCS)
>> Macquarie University
>> Ph 61 (2) 9850 8623
>> Fx 61 (2) 9850 6059
>
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----------------------------------------------------------
Thomas G. Fikes
Dept. of Psychology, Westmont College
Santa Barbara, CA 93108
805.565.6115 (voice); 805.565.6116 (fax)
web: http://homepage.westmont.edu/~fikes
3
> I just ordered some cards from Eric at ActiveWire, & we did talk about
> the possibility of ActiveWire building a box. He was interested in
> hearing what sorts of specs (e.g., # of buttons, configuration, led
> indicators) would be useful. It would be nice to hear some suggestions
> from the psychtoolbox group.

That would be cool. Here is what I want in a box. But I think that was where
we were at many months ago, so some kind of concrete progress would be even
better :-)

> Also, the OSX support should be here any day, he said. I don't know anything
> about the delcom product, but I've been happy with support & product from
> ActiveWire. As an additional plus, they're developing what sound like very
> nice A-D & D-A boards -- at a *very* reasonable price.

That will be good to see ( you can tell it is either to early in the morning
here or I am sceptical, I will claim the former for purposes of plausible
deniability later on when they do deliver cheap A/D with OS X support :-)

OS X support for the <www.delcom-eng.com> board is courtesy of an Apple
engineer who knocked it together in a couple of days as a hobby. I
understand that the same kind of support has been passed on to ActiveWire,
just with no response. So I became a delcom user. Support for the delcom
board has also been included in Smile*

Delcom's board is $49 in units of 1 for a development board with a byte of
DIP switch inputs and a byte of LED outputs for easy debugging. A minimum
board is about $25 in quantity.

The OS X drivers are rock solid, and very easy to program with - even I got
a little hack working where dialling in a value on the DIP switch set the
cycling speed of the LEDs on the development board. Made my day (I know,
sad, but true :-)

Best wishes as ever,

Tim

*For those of you not into AppleScript yet, Smile is a free IDE for
AppleScript by a company whose business is image processing. They recently
started building what they call "smile-lab" which uses AppleScript to
support a Matlab-type environment. Makes it easy to do quite nice pdf
graphics and growing fairly fast. It is not (I rush to say) accompanied by a
suite of toolboxes like matlab. But most people here, correct me if I am
wrong? Don't use too many toolbox extensions, just the basic language and a
few math functions?