Trigger Code Hardware Setup

Setting up a PC to use a PCIe parallel port card

This information is mostly for Aaron or anyone else who might be setting up a PC for the first time.

You will need to go to https://www.highrez.co.uk/Downloads/InpOut32/default.htm and download the latest binaries. Unzip the file, then run as administrator Win32\InstallDriver to install the drivers system-wide.

Copy drivers to experiment folder

Once this is done, at least for PsychoPy, experimenters will also need to copy the files inpoutx64.dll and inpoutx64.lib from the x64 folder, and then the file inpout32.h from the Win32 folder. Place a copy of all of these in the same folder as your PsychoPy experiment file (the one with the .psyexp filetype).

Setting up a PC to use the USB-1208FS

An alternative to a PCIe card (especially useful with laptops and mini-PCs) is the USB-1208FS DAQ. We have one in the lab (enclosed in a literal black box). To make this work, you first need to install the drivers and other support software, specifically the MCC DAQ Software. This includes several necessary components including InstaCal and Universal Library. Installation is pretty straightforward — just run the installer and say yes to everything it asks, including rebooting as necessary.

Using the USB-1208FS with PsychoPy

This PsychoPy forum post was helpful. The first step, installing Universal Library, will have already been done when you installed the MCC DAQ software in the previous step. Now, download and install PyUniversalLibrary. "Install" here basically means "save it somewhere on the PC where you can acess it", and then open PsychoPy, go to Preferences -> General -> Paths, and add the full path to the PyUniversalLibrary folder (e.g.,

The above-linked forum post also notes PyUniversalLibrary can be installed using pip.

My experience was that PyUniversalLibrary did not work out of the box. Specifically, the line in UniversalLibrary.py that reads:cbw = ctypes.windll.cbw32

Needs to be changed to: cbw = ctypes.WinDLL('/Path/to/UniversalLibrary/cbw64')

Note that the above is case-sensitive (change windll to WinDLL ) and the 32 needs to be changed to 64 (unless you're running a 32-bit version of Windows, which you probably aren't). As well, the sample code on that PsychoPy forum post should be used as the basis for sending codes in your experiment; the typical parallel code will not work. NCIL's GitHub organization page has a repository with sample code, including the modified version of UniversalLibrary.py as per the notes above.