We will be running Psychtoolbox on the new mac Minis (2019). Apple does not share information (at least not with us) regarding how often the keyboard status is being checked by the OS. Does anyone here know what kind of latency we are talking about for a wired, USB, mac keyboard? Some years ago, it used to be in the order of 15 ms. And we did find out that wireless keyboards have a 4-15ms variable latency. But, we have not found out anything about wired, USB keyboards.
Thank you very much for your help. It is much appreciated.
Alejandro.
My deepest condolences for your choice of hardware and operating system. Yes, Apple is not great at sharing information, or playing nice with others. If there were only other hardware that is cheaper and more powerful, or other operating systems that are free and work much better for neuroscience applications…
To answer your question, in Psychtoolbox there’s HIDIntervalTest to figure out the sampling interval yourself (most likely 8 msecs) and KeyboardLatencyTest to figure out keyboard latency/timing accuracy with the help of a microphone. But standard keyboards rarely have more stable timing than 15 - 50 msecs variability. Gaming keyboards can do much better if used with proper operating systems like Linux.
Thanks for the answer regarding the keyboard latency test, Mario. Much appreciated.