Experiment settings

experiment

The values in this section are used as defaults when a new stimulus configuration file is created. You can change the exact value in the stimulus configuration GUI, so here you need to only choose the most common values you expect to use. Likely you can leave all of these as they are.

• defaultDutyCycleHz is the default duty cycle (the frequency) at which the laser will stimulate each point. A value of 40 Hz or 50 Hz is commonly used in the field.

• defaultLaserPowerMWdefines the time-averaged power in mW at the sample surface used for stimulation. In other words, if two points are being stimulated in a single trial and requested power is 2 mW then the laser would deliver 4 mW at the sample. A power meter receiving light from just one of those points would report an average power of 2 mW.

• offRampDownDuration_ms defines the time course over which the laser will decay from the chosen stimulation power in mW to zero mW. About 250 ms has been shown to be a good choice.

• maxStimPointsPerCondition: Set to 2 by default. Zapit can present multiple spots per trial but is limited by laser power and galvo speed. You can increase this value if you need multiple points in a trial. This setting will likely be removed in a future release. As a rough idea, a setup that delivers 60 mW of power at the sample should be able to stimulate about 18 points before it runs out of power. The default blanking settings allow for up to 25 points per trial assuming laser power is not a limiting factor.

• blankingTime_ms defines the number of ms during which the beam is switched off and the scanners move from one point to the next. Probably you don't need ever to change this.

Once you have finished editing these, you can save the settings file.