System Synchronization

[kaylanguyen1]

We recently encountered an issue while coding our tasks in PyControl. Our goal is to have PyControl remain on standby until it receives a signal from another program, at which point it should start. However, it seems that PyControl always starts the timer as soon as we press "Start," and we haven't found a way to implement the desired standby behavior.
Does anyone happen to know if there's a way to achieve this synchronization?

[alustig3]

Could you provide more details please?

• What is the other program?
• What sort of signal is being sent from it? For instance, is it outputting a hardware signal that you are routing into the pyboard breakout or is it outputting a software message that you would like the pyControl software to pick up on?
• Are you trying to start multiple rigs using the run_experiment tab, or just a single rig using the run_task tab?

Depending on your answers to above, there could be a couple solutions.

One way could be to have the task's intial_state be something like standby_state, then have your other program send a signal (via hardware or the API) that will cause a transition out of the standby_state. That transition will be logged with a timestamp that you can use to offset all later data during analysis.

Another more complicated way, depending on what you need, could be to modify the pyControl GUI software by editing the code that starts the task

[JunoWuu]

Hi! Thank you for the prompt response, we are trying to have bonsai(https://bonsai-rx.org) send a signal to our pycontrol so that everything can starts at the same time
The signal is just an electrical pulse. We have the wires connected our breakout board so supposedly pycontrol should wait till it receives that pulse to start the task
And yes we always use run_experiment tab.
What we found is that the pycontrol timer starts right away even if we add a standby state. Could be something to change on our pycontrol task codes?

[alustig3]

Do you mind sharing your task code? You can copy it into this discussion (see how here) or save the task file as a .txt file and attach it.