ROBucket

Macarena Churruca, a grad student in Chile sent me this photo of a modification that puts the ROBucket electronics on a larger box, and mounts them the the outside!  

She also sent a video!

I was asked by a researcher in Chile how to read from the photointerrupter on the center port (where sucrose is dispensed).  I wrote a quick update (available in the files area) that activates the center port.  It shows the Active (A), Inactive (I), Center (C) and Rewards (Rew) on the screen during trials, and writes a new column "Center" to the CSV files.   

Shawn Minnig and his colleagues recently used ROBuckets to study learning in transgenic mice to better understand Huntington's disease.  They made a very nice modification to improve the mounting of ROBucket in the actual Bucket, and also designed a sound attenuating enclosure system for ROBuckets.  And they released all of their modifications as open source!  It's great to see this!

I was contacted by a couple people about ROBucket over the last year, and decided to update its code and make it a bit easier for people to use it.  

Unfortunately, Adafruit made two versions of their Arduino SD shield.  In the ROBucket paper we used version 1 of the shield, which was discontinued later that year.  Adafruit made several improvements in version 2, but unfortunately the original ROBucket code can not run with this version without modifications.  While making these modifications I ended up rewriting the code with better commenting so it should be easier to read and modify.  

Full code here, main loop sans functions below.  Feedback welcome!

void loop() {
  updateDisplay();
  readPokes();
  if (ratio_Met) {
    dispense();
    timeout();
  }
}