USB to Parallel port Trigger Interface

1

Hello everybody,


I came across this USB to paralell port cable  (cortech solutions see: http://www.cortechsolutions.com/Products/SD/SD-MS/SD-MS-TC/001114) and was wondering if anyone ever tried to use it in psychtoolbox?


We are using a mac as a stimulus computer and therefore have no parallel port. We would like to send triggers via the parallel port to the trigger input of a BIOSEMI amplifier.


Thank You!

Johanna

2
I would recommend something simpler and much cheaper, e.g. the Neurospec trigger box (https://www.neurospec.com/News, 2nd item; see also last item on page 19 of https://www.neurospec.com/Content/Files/Support/Pricelists/1_PL_EUR_E_2016.pdf).
This is just an Arduino using standard Arduino drivers. It appears as a virtual serial port, so you would send triggers with PTB's IOPort module. On a Win7-64 PC, with PTB/IOPort, the command-to-output latency is better than 180 microseconds. Never tried it with a Mac though.

Marc
3
A similar solution, and comparatively cheap around 40-50 Euros iirc, is the UBW32 Bitwhacker. Shows up as a virtual serial port, and its default firmware allows simple ASCII commands to query or set programmable I/O pins. There's an entry about it in our FAQ section about triggers on the PTB Wiki.

Or suitable USB-serial port converters, where one can use IOPort to control the RTS or DTR pins to emit simple trigger signals.

Marc, adding a reference to that NeuroSpec box to our Wiki's trigger FAQ entry, with your experiences with it, would be good.

-mario

---In PSYCHTOOLBOX@yahoogroups.com, <marc.repnow@...> wrote :

I would recommend something simpler and much cheaper, e.g. the Neurospec trigger box (https://www.neurospec.com/News, 2nd item; see also last item on page 19 of https://www.neurospec.com/Content/Files/Support/Pricelists/1_PL_EUR_E_2016.pdf).
This is just an Arduino using standard Arduino drivers. It appears as a virtual serial port, so you would send triggers with PTB's IOPort module. On a Win7-64 PC, with PTB/IOPort, the command-to-output latency is better than 180 microseconds. Never tried it with a Mac though.

Marc