kontroller2

A modern, event-driven hardware I/O controller written around MATLAB's DAQ toolbox. Better than kontroller. kontroller2 is currently under active development, and does not work at all. Look at the kanban for an idea of where this project is.

Philosophy

kontroller2 is being developed with the following design goals in mind:

0. The hardware abstraction layer

The goal of the original kontroller which is even sharper in kontroller2, is to act as a hardware abstraction layer, where real devices, valves, lights, sensors and motors appear as black boxes that are directly accessible by software. Thus, every hardware tuning or design problem becomes a numerical optimization problem. The goal is let a computer do things to machines that you would normally do, so that you can throw your favorite brute-force algorithm at the problem and solve it, instead of trying to figure out what's going on.

1. Dual GUI + programmatic interface

Everything in kontroller2 can be either controlled by a intuitive GUI, or through a programmatic, object-oriented interface. You should be able to do something via the GUI, switch to headless mode, do something via a third-party wrapper, and then switch back to the GUI, and everything should just work. kontroller2 achieves this by inheriting from the MATLAB handle class.

2. Plugin architecture.

Almost everything in kontroller2 is written a plugin. kontroller2 plugins are simply methods, so extending this is as simple as writing more methods. Because kontroller2 uses a classdef folder (i.e. @kontroller2), installing new plugins is as simple as dropping new .m files into this folder. kontroller2 does the hard work of figuring out what the plugin is, and using it intelligently. To see the plugins that you have installed, use:

k = kontroller2;
k.plugins;

Plugin architecture make the code highly modular, and almost everything can be ripped out and kontroller2 will still work.

3. The event loop

kontroller2 is heavily influenced by the concept of the event loop, for example like the one at the heart of node.js.

Requirements

1. MATLAB
2. A Windows computer
3. A compatible National Instruments DAQ system
4. NI drivers
5. MATLAB's DAQ toolbox

Installation

The recommended way to install kontroller2 is to use my package manager:

urlwrite('http://srinivas.gs/install.m','install.m'); 
install sg-s/kontroller2
install sg-s/srinivas.gs_mtools

if you have git installed, you can

git clone https://github.com/sg-s/kontroller2
git clone https://github.com/sg-s/srinivas.gs_mtools # kontroller needs this to work

and don't forget to add these folders to your MATLAB path

The kontroller2 data structure

Saved data is stored in a MAT file in the variable data. data is a structure with the following fields:

* --inputs--
* Input1        (dynamically 
* Input2        named based on
* ...           what you configure
* InputN        your input channels)
*
* --outputs--
* Output1		(dynamically 
* Output2		named based on
* ...			what you configure
* OutputN		your output channels)
* 
* --additional data--
* paradigm      stores paradigm name, if this comes from a control paradigm 
* trial         stores trial #, if this comes from a control paradigm
* control_mode	how was kontroller being controlled? 

data is a structure array, so the first trial is stored in data(1) and so on.

License

kontroller2 is free software, under the GPL v3. If you use kontroller2, please write to me to properly cite this.