Point Grey Flea3 FL3-U3-13S2M camera sync with OE and Pycontrol

[FlaviaRicciardi]

Dear community,
My aim is to align behavior with neural recordings. I am using Point Grey Flea3 FL3-U3-13S2M FW:v2.14.3.01 for video recording and Open Ephys (OE) acquisition board for neural recording.

To achieve this: From pycontrol, I will send to OpenEphys acquisition board the rsync tool (in the attached scheme is the black line from DAC_1 to port 2 of I/O board);

• a digital output that is split between OE (in the attached scheme is from BNC1 black line plugged in port 1 of the I/O board) for the OE start recording and the camera to receive the trigger (trigger in) to start image acquisition (in the scheme attached line 3);
• from the camera, I will send to OE (in attached scheme line 2 connected from the camera to port 4 of I/O board) TTL for each frame is grabbed;
• I also would like the camera to start recording video when I press start on the PyControl task ( I am not sure if can I achieve this without manually pressing the record bottom of its software or Spinview SDK).

I am experiencing issues configuring this Point Grey Flea3 FL3-U3-13S2M camera in the way explained above ( using the Fly Capture2 SDK or Spinview SDK). It seems that the camera can only send TTL out or only receive Trigger in but not do both at the same time. If this way to synch make sense and is not wrong, how should I deal with this issue?
I attached a schema of what I did

ps. I called Line 3 and Line 2 regarding the configuration mode by SpinView, but for you to understand, I am using these cables of the Hirose 8pin grey cable that my camera has.

thank you in advance
Flavia

[ThomasAkam]

Hi @FlaviaRicciardi,

If you can accept sync accuracy of the video to the nearest frame rather than with ms precision you can just send rsync pulses from pyControl to the camera and open ephys (using an BNC splitter) as detailed in the previous thread here and syncrhonisation docs.

If you need more precision in syncing the video frames with the other systems then one option would be to use pyControl to trigger the camera frames. To do this you would use the Frame_trigger class to output regular pulses from one of the pyControl BNC connectors, and would split this signal to go to the camera to trigger frame acqusition, and to the open ephys system to record the pulse times there also. This would require configuring the camera to acquire frames when triggered by an external input. This appears to be supported in the spinview application but I have not tried doing it. We are planning to implement the ability to use an external trigger for frame acqusition in pyMultiVideo, I hope we will get this working in the next few weeks and will post here when we do.