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Getting Started with The Lab Rat

The Lab Rat system is used with Corpus, TDT's S3 hardware emulator, and Synapse Lite, TDT's state of the art neural recording and control software.

Installing Drivers and Software

The USB stick that came with your Lab Rat system includes Synapse Lite installation package.

  1. To install the software, run SynapseLite.exe on the USB stick.

  2. After installation, connect your LR10 to the PC via the USB cable that came with your system.

  3. Launch Synapse Lite from the desktop shortcut to check the connectivity of your LR10 for the first time. Synapse Lite automatically launches Corpus when it runs.


  4. Corpus emulates an RZ2 with 8 DSPs, and an LR10 will appear as connected hardware.


    Green Rat Icon will appear in Corpus if your interface module is connected and running at USB 3.0 speeds.

    Red Rat Icon will appear if you are running at USB 2.0 speed, and you should change to a USB 3.0 port.

    Gray Rat Icon will appear if LR10 is not detected.

  5. Watch the Lab Rat Tutorial videos that installed to your desktop to get started with the Synapse Lite software. These will familiarize you with the core elements of Synapse and guide you through your first Lab Rat experiment where you will acquire real biopotentials using your Lab Rat hardware and perform online signal processing.

Corpus

Corpus is a software program that runs on any Windows PC and provides emulation capabilities of TDT's S3 hardware. Corpus automatically launches when you start Synapse Lite. The LR10 serves as a peripheral acquisition and surrogate I/O device of a standard RZ2 hardware device.

The emulator simulates hardware function in pseudo real-time, but unlike real hardware, Corpus will slow down processing and stretch time as its processing limits are exceeded. This means that Lab Rat experiments with high processing demands may experience a time delay in data acquisition and feedback control.

Synapse Lite

Synapse is TDT's industry-leading neurophysiology experiment platform. With Synapse, investigators can design complex neurophysiology experiments to acquire data and control conditional outputs by simply placing a few experiment modules, called Gizmos, into a processing tree. This powerful software enables the execution of standard neuroscience protocols, such as online PCA spike sorting or stimulation, in a matter of minutes. More complicated behavioral paradigms, with or without closed-loop feedback, can be easily achieved with our over 25 ready-made gizmos or an infinite number of user-made custom gizmos.

Synapse Lite is an almost complete version of Synapse, with minor elements removed for compatibility with the Lab Rat system. Acquisition and I/O processes for experimental/ gizmo dependencies can be setup through the Lab Rat Object in the Processing Tree, described on the next page.