Acquisition boards are back in stock

The Open Ephys acquisition board is the most affordable way to get up and running with high-channel-count electrophysiology. We recently received news that additional acquisition boards have been produced by CircuitHub and are ready for distribution. As of September 4th, boards are available for purchase via credit card from our online store, or by emailing info@open-ephys.org to request a quote. We expect these boards will sell out quickly, so we’re limiting purchases to one per order and giving priority to labs that would like to start using the system right away.

If you don’t receive one of the boards made by CircuitHub, the Champalimaud Institute has greenlighted the manufacture of 50 additional boards, which should be available soon.

USB 3.0 data transmission

Thanks to the dedicated efforts of our support person, Aarón Cuevas López, the Open Ephys acquisition board and GUI now work with the Opal Kelly XEM6310 FPGA development board, which transmits data via USB 3.0. Previously, it was only possible to use the acquisition board with the XEM6010, which uses the USB 2.0 protocol. USB 3.0 is capable of much higher transfer speeds, and thus increases the maximum number of neural data channels per acquisition board to 512, up from 256. To upgrade your system, all you need to do is swap in an XEM6310 board (available for purchase here for $500). The acquisition board will then work with up to eight 64-channel headstages from Intan, assuming it’s connected to a reasonably fast PC. For high-channel-count recordings, it's necessary to use the HDF5-based KWIK data format, which has now been thoroughly tested in a variety of experimental settings.

Open Ephys at SfN 2015

At this year’s Society for Neuroscience meeting in Chicago, we’re hosting another Open Ephys information session on Monday, October 19th, following the afternoon poster session. Jakob, Josh, and Aarón will discuss the progress we’ve made over the past year and field questions from the audience. At the 2014 meeting, the info session provided a great opportunity for community members to meet one another and discuss their experiences using our tools.

In addition, we’ll be presenting a poster on Sunday afternoon titled “The Open Ephys GUI: Plugin-based software for high-channel-count electrophysiology” (BB46). The poster will focus on the modular architecture for modifying and extending our software. Aarón is the lead presenter, but Josh and Jakob will be around as well.

If you're presenting a poster or talk based on data collected with Open Ephys software or hardware, please let us know! We'd love to stop by.

We’ll send out more details about the info session and poster closer to the meeting. Hope to see you there!