AOMcontrol organization

Basics

From the command line run AOMcontrol. This will prompt a series of dialogue boxes.

1. Indicate whether you are connected to an AOSLO.

Offline mode is provided to test experiments when not connected to an AOSLO.

2. FPGA warning.

If you answered yes to the first question you will be prompted with a second dialogue box warning you that your FPGA must be running before proceeding.

If you accidentally answered yes to question 1 are not actually connected to an AOSLO/FPGA board, you will see a series error messages when you press 'ok'. Just run the AOMcontrol command again and select the correct option.

3. The AOMcontrol gui:

This is the main gui from which you will run your experiments.

Loading image files

Select a bmp file to render.

Loading experiments

Select the experiments radio button at the top. Then select the desired experiment from the drop down menu and press "Config & Start".

The simulator window

The center, maroon portion of the AOMcontrol gui will display the stimuli being rendered through the system in real time. It will also show stimuli during Offline testing mode.

TCA button

Loads image based TCA stimuli. Make sure that ICANDI stabilization mode is running and a stimulus location has been selected in the stabilized frame.

Pupil tracking button

See documentation for more details.

H/V offsets and uW power sliders

These sliders should be disabled in the current version of AOMcontrol. They should be set in experiment scripts.

File organization

AOMcontrol code is organized as follows:

AOMcontrol
    BMP_files
    Experiments
    tempStimulus
    +exp
    +stim
    +aom

• The main program files are contained in the highest level directory AOMcontrol.
• The directory BMP_files contains a database of commonly used BMP files. In general, no new files should be added to this directory.
• When a new BMP or BUF file is to be created during an experiment, it should be saved in the tempStimulus directory and deleted at the conclusion of the experiment.
• Scripts for running experiments are saved in the Experiments directory.
• The directories beginning with + contain functions commonly used during experiments. These methods were added to simplify experiment scripts and reduce the amount of redundant code.