Visiomode is an open-source platform for rodent touchscreen-based visuomotor tasks. It has been designed to promote the use of touchscreens as an accessible option for implementing a variety of visual task paradigms, with low-cost and ease-of-use as a priority. Visiomode is implemented on the popular Raspberry Pi computer, and provides the user with an intuitive web interface to design and manage experiments. It can be deployed as a stand-alone cognitive testing solution in both freely-moving and head-restrained environments.

Installation

Raspberry Pi OS (recommended)

The recommended way to install Visiomode is by using pipx (https://pypa.github.io/pipx/). pipx will create an isolated python environment from which Visiomode will run, leaving the system python alone. This is the recommended way to install Visiomode, as it will not interfere with any other python packages you may have installed on your system.

First, make sure that your Raspberry Pi OS is up-to-date.

sudo apt update && sudo apt upgrade

Visiomode runs on SDL 2.0. To make sure all system dependencies are present, run

sudo apt install -y libhdf5-dev libsdl2-mixer-2.0-0 libsdl2-image-2.0-0 libsdl2-2.0-0 libsdl2-ttf-2.0-0

Install pipx using

sudo apt install pipx

And finally, install Visiomode using pipx:

pipx install visiomode

Linux / MacOS

While Visiomode primarily targets the Raspberry Pi OS, it can be installed on any Linux or MacOS machine, which can be useful for trying out the software before deployment, or for testing. Please note that only the Raspberry Pi OS is officially supported - your milage with any other Linux distribution or MacOS in production may vary.

The recommended way to install Visiomode is via pipx (https://pypa.github.io/pipx/).

pipx install visiomode

Usage

To launch Visiomode, open a terminal and run

visiomode

If running over ssh, you will need to prepend DISPLAY=:0 to the visiomode command to run the behaviour window on the primary display.

DISPLAY=:0 visiomode

This will launch the behaviour window (what the animal sees). The web interface can be accessed from any machine connected on the same network as the Raspberry Pi running Visiomode at http://<YOUR-PI-HOSTNAME>.local:5000, where <YOUR-PI-HOSTNAME> is the hostname of your Raspberry Pi. If you're unsure on what this is, run hostname in a terminal window.

Upgrading

Use pipx to upgrade visiomode:

pipx upgrade visiomode

Contributing

Visiomode is currently closed to PRs, except bugfixes. Please open an issue if you wish to contribute.

Funders