Dual site photometry with pyPhotometry

[SaradeLeo]

Hi! I have been using the pyPhotometry system and had a very good time running several 2EM_2EX experiments. I am looking into implementing dual site photometry now.
Is it possible to somehow split the pyPhotometry acquisition board signals to 2 minicubes for dual site recordings? if anyone has tried, what would be the limitations?

Alternatively, could 2 pyPhotometry acquisition boards (each connected to its own mini cube) be set up to share the same input from the GUI?

The concern with independent systems used for the dual recording would be that the light used in one site might interfere with the other site, especially when using the time-division setting.

Thank you in advance for any advice on this!

Sara

[ThomasAkam]

Hi @SaradeLeo,

I don't think there would be any easy way to use one pyPhotometry board to control two minicubes.

You can certainly use one instance of the GUI to record from two pyPhotometry board controlling two minicubes. For dual site recordings there is a concern that light from one site might affect recordings at the other if the light pulses were not synchronous. I think in practice this may well not cause an issue unless the fibers are very close together due to the rapid drop-off in light intesnsity with distance from the fiber tip.

It would be fairly straightforward to modify the system so that the light pulses were synchronised between the two systems, by sending a pulse out from one of the digital IO connectors on one system which triggered the acqusition cycle on the other. I could give advice on how to do this if you are interested in trying to implement it.