Recorder

Apps for controlling acquisition on the Bruker 2P setup, LNCM / Dudok lab.

The video-EEG recorder for the Pinnacle setups (VideoEEG, EEG-Cam, ClosedLoop_Pinnacle) moved to Pinnacle-vEEG on 2026-10-25.

Contents

• Recorder/RecorderGUI_CL.py: starts and stops a synchronous recording: 2P (PrairieLink), behavior camera, treadmill (pyControl) and stimulator, all with the same file name. Optional remote start from RealTime (closed loop) on another PC.
• Camera/CamGUI.py: preview and recording for the externally triggered ToupCam behavior camera.
• OptoTrigger/Stim_StateMachine*: Arduino sketches for the closed-loop optogenetics accessory board. OptoTrigger/serial_send.py sends stimulation settings to it (configs in that file).
• dev_scripts/: hardware checks for the camera, not used by the apps. See the top of each script.
• tests/: pytest tests (uv run pytest). Scripts outside this folder should not have "test" in their names.

The treadmill runs on our pyControl fork, bdudok/PyControl_LNCM.

How the apps talk

All on the Bruker PC, except RealTime. RecorderGUI_CL sends set, go and stop requests (zmq REQ/REP) to the other apps. The camera and pyControl GUIs answer only while armed. Without an answer within 15 s the Recorder marks that device red and carries on without blocking.

App	Port	Notes
CamGUI	5555	arm before recording
pyControl GUI	5556	"Synchronous recording" box; arm after uploading the task
RealTime (other PC)	5557	remote start; closedloop_host in RecorderGUI_CL

Setup

The apps run in a uv environment defined by pyproject.toml and uv.lock (Python 3.11, PySide6). RecorderGUI_CL also imports BaserowAPI from LNCM-lib, which must be checked out next to this repo and be on the path. Recorder/token.py (Baserow token) is not in git.

git clone https://github.com/bdudok/Recorder.git
cd Recorder
uv sync

To run the apps, double-click Recorder.bat and CamGUI.bat, or make desktop shortcuts to them as described in the pyControl installation. Each one uses this repo's .venv and works from any folder.

Or from the repo folder (PowerShell):

$env:PYTHONPATH = "..\LNCM-lib"
uv run python -m Recorder.RecorderGUI_CL
uv run python -m Camera.CamGUI

To work on the code in PyCharm, use .venv\Scripts\python.exe as the project interpreter and keep LNCM-lib as a module dependency of the project, which puts it on the path.

The pyControl GUI does not use this environment. It has its own, in PyControl\.venv: see pyControl installation.

Updating the Bruker PC from the old environment: BRUKER_PC_UPDATE.md.