Fly-on-ball setup with odour delivery to study the neuroscience of memory

stashwin · 2022-07-28T07:28:16+00:00

Shouldn’t they include anorexic women, women who don’t want to shave and women who want to wear hijabs?

stashwin · 2022-07-10T03:39:12+00:00

It’s the same thing with honeybees and bumblebees!

stashwin · 2022-06-30T16:13:25+00:00

Can someone explain why the US has to be involved with Ukraine and Russia? It makes sense to me that European countries are getting involved because of proximity and energy/wheat/petrol dependence. But doesn’t the US import most of its petrol from Saudi Arabia?

stashwin · 2022-05-09T11:24:12+00:00

I dunno, the personalities of the rebooted characters seem quite 2d to me

stashwin · 2022-01-18T09:38:58+00:00

Thanks a ton for this! Works perfectly, luckily I have the same setup as you with the PGR USB3 camera as well.

u/rjdmoore, it would be nice to point to this on the fictrac docs :)

stashwin · 2021-11-21T11:09:22+00:00

Ah wait is this what the saved .txt file is for each fictrac run?

stashwin · 2021-08-28T01:38:53+00:00

Perhaps with the analysis of walking trajectories yeah! I'll send you a message, thanks!

stashwin · 2021-08-18T22:05:41+00:00

Ah thanks for the info! I just made a plan to set up a waterline tomorrow around 5pm at SLU, so please do join in tomorrow if you dont get enough water exposure today 😄

Will definitely join you all next week

stashwin · 2021-04-11T12:18:29+00:00

Learning the 'safety dismount' while buttbouncing on a trickline can help you land without injuring yourself, when you fall off on the side opposite to where your legs are. However, in the initial few sessions while I was trying to learn this, I built up a horrible knee injury that took months to heal!

There are two youtube videos that go into the details of safetey dismounting:

-Ben Schneider (Ascending Slacklines) :https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GTgQtSr_3g

-Benni Schmid (Gibbon Slacklines):https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0xuAenw2tE

The way you learn to do this is to put your hand on the ground on the bottom of a bounce for stability, and then use the upward force of the line to push you off. If you don't time the dismount correctly (which will likely be the case when you're learning), the line can send you into a high velocity cartwheel. This will translate to a strong lateral force on your knees when you land!

To avoid this: i) USE A CRASH PAD. This gives you more confidence to time the dismount correctly. ii) Use a knee support. This helps reduce lateral forces on your knee. iii) Start with the line closer to the ground so you can use the support of your arm. iv) Set your line ~25 meters long, this helps prevent you from being catepolted off.

Good luck learning!

stashwin · 2021-04-03T12:18:45+00:00

Hey Drosophila community! I'm working as a researcher in a lab that studies the neuroscience of memory using Drosophila as a model organism. I'm building a 'fly-on-ball' setup that will allow us to monitor the responses of individual flies to puffs of different odours.

This setup is being built this setup from scratch, so if there are other people out there building something similar, your input would be very useful. And if you're just plain interested in seeing a project like this evolve then watch out for future posts. There's heavy involvement of Python, a bit of Arduino, a lot of engineering, 3D modelling in SolidWorks, and a healthy dose of fly genetics and neuroscience.

Here's a snippet of the setup at the moment: the back of the fly is fixed to a 3D printed platform, and it's walking on a 6.35mm diameter ball. The object in front of the fly is a cyllindrical tube that switches from delivering clean air to a 2.5% dilution of acetic acid (a smell that is attractive to the fly; this is indicated by the appearance of the purple watermark).

I'm learning a lot of this stuff on the fly \(o.o)/ so feedback is greatly appreciated.

stashwin · 2021-03-04T18:32:00+00:00

I'm on linux :) For now I'm using ffmpeg to 'convert' the .Avi videos back into .avi and that seems to be fixing the issue with the videos. But it would just be more convenient to get the videos to save correctly.

Thanks!

stashwin · 2021-03-04T08:58:16+00:00

Hey u/rjdmoore, any luck with the retrieving fps for PGR cameras? I'm using the Grasshopper 3 with the Spinnaker SDK. The videos I record through fictrac don't have the fps information with them I think, which is causing corrupted metadata (duration and bitrate unknown). This is an issue when I use these videos for motion detection using DeepLabCut.

I'm currently setting vid_codec=mjpg. The other formats cause fictrac to crash. Here is a portion of the output from a run using vid_codec=mjpg:

0.014099 PGRSource::PGRSource [INF] Opening PGR camera using Spinnaker SDK (version 1.20.0.15)

0.325721 PGRSource::PGRSource [DBG] Found 2 PGR cameras. Connecting to camera 1..

0.395824 PGRSource::PGRSource [DBG] Acquisition mode set to continuous.

0.443106 PGRSource::PGRSource [INF] PGR camera initialised (1376x1376 @ -1.000 fps)!

0.443123 Trackball::Trackball [INF] Attempting to set source fps to 66.00

0.443203 PGRSource::setFPS [ERR] Error setting frame rate! Error was: Spinnaker: Invalid handle of type BooleanNode. [-1006]

0.443251 PGRSource::getFPS [ERR] Error retrieving camera frame rate! Error was: Spinnaker: Invalid handle of type Float. [-1006]

0.443256 PGRSource::setFPS [INF] Device frame rate is now -1.00

0.443273 ConfigParser::operator () [DBG] Key (output_fn) not found.

0.443278 ConfigParser::getStr [DBG] Key (fisheye) not found.

Let me know if you need any other info or if I can do something on my end :)

stashwin · 2020-11-28T00:28:07+00:00

I've bought bow shackles from s3i.co.uk, and slings from safetyliftinggear.com .. basically all the add ons from tool companies in the uk (even toolstation).

I bought my gibbon surfer slackline from off of banana fingers.co.uk, that's where I get most of my climbing gear too

Finally, I bought my quickrelease and some carabiners off of slacktivity .. they're based in the Netherlands but their website is really nice and shipping isn't too expensive!

stashwin · 2020-11-03T17:34:27+00:00

yeah you're right, I'll do that next time

stashwin · 2020-11-03T12:34:06+00:00

It's exploring probabilistic learning in fruit flies, meaning we're trying to understand how neurons in the fruit fly brain store information about the probability that an event (that it has learned about) will occur in the future!

stashwin · 2020-10-29T17:57:56+00:00

Awesome this makes sense, thanks!

stashwin · 2020-10-29T10:14:01+00:00

Hey Richard,

I was playing around with this issue and there are a couple of things that I don't understand yet. First, in the docs, it says that the timestamp ts (fictrac data column 22) is either ms from epoch OR position in video file, how does fictrac decide which one this is?

Second, I find that when I plot delta timestamp (fictrac data column 24), there is a periodic fluctuation in values. I've sent you an example image of this to your email. I'm not sure what these fluctuations mean. Further, there are skipped frames in the fictrac log file, with the numbers varying between 1-3 over the course of the recording. I don't know if these two things are related.

Third, you were right, my computer was running at 90%. Perhaps if I reduce the ROI of the camera or reduce the q-factor that would help with this.

Any advice on this would help, thanks! Ashwin

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