toon 0.11.2

Tools for neuroscience experiments

toon

Description

Additional tools for neuroscience experiments, including:

• A framework for polling input devices on a separate process.
• A framework for animating elements.

Everything should work on Windows/Mac/Linux.

See requirements.txt for dependencies.

Install

Current release:

pip install toon

Development version:

pip install git+https://github.com/aforren1/toon

For full install (including dependencies of included devices):

pip install toon[full]

See setup.py for a list of those dependencies, as well as device-specific subdivisions.

Usage Overview

Input

This module allows us to sample from external devices on a secondary process at high rates, and efficiently move that data to the main process via the multiprocessing module.

Generally useful input devices include:

• Keyboard (for changes in keyboard state) via Keyboard
• Mouse (for mouse position) via Mouse

The following are in-house devices, which may not be generally useful but could serve as examples of how to implement additional devices:

• HAND (custom force measurement device using hidapi) via Hand (for pyusb example, see USBHand)
• Force Keyboard (predecessor to HAND) via ForceKeyboard (Windows only, due to nidaqmx requirement.)
• Flock of Birds (the 1992 vintage from Ascension) via Birds (very specific to the KineReach setup in the BLAM Lab)
• CyberGlove I (I think? Immersion Corp. branding) via Cyberglove

Generally, input devices can be used as follows:

from toon.input import MpDevice
import <device>

dev = MpDevice(<device>, <device-specific kwargs>)

with dev:
    while not done:
        data = dev.read()
        if data.any():
            pass # do something with the data
        ...

See the demos/ folder or snippets in the source of individual devices for usage examples.

Animation

The anim module was derived from Magnum (though I currently don't implement as many features). See here for background.

A quick example:

from time import sleep
from toon.anim import Player
from toon.anim import Track
from toon.anim import Timeline
from toon.anim.easing import elastic_in

class Circle(object):
    x = 0
    y = 0

circle = Circle()
keyframes = [(0, 0), (0.5, 0.8), (1.0, 1.0)]
track = Track(keyframes, easing=elastic_in)
player = Player()
player.add(track, 'x', circle)

timeline = Timeline()
timeline.start()
player.start(timeline.frame_time)

while timeline.frame_time < 2:
    timeline.next_frame()
    player.update(timeline.frame_time)
    print(circle.x)
    # flip window
    sleep(0.016)

See the demos/ folder for a more thorough example including integration with psychopy.