This document gives you an overview of how to use our G3 VR set ups with awake behaving flies on a ball, in concert with FicTrac and custom code for delivering your visual stimulus.

Hardware Assembly#

There are various hardware set ups that could work. Here we give an example of a simple set up, with common equipment within the Wilson lab.

  • Construct or otherwise acquire a G3 arena
  • Construct or otherwise acquire a controller box for the arena.
  • Inline heater (e.g. TC-324C, Warner Instruments)
  • FLIR camera (e.g. Chameleon3)
  • IR light source
  • Fly ball (machined from foam, painted with black dots)
  • Fly ball holder (3D printed)
  • Fly mount (3D printed)

Software installation#

  • Install Spinnaker
  • Install the latest MATLAB, Visual Studio and PyCharm
  • Install FicTrac
    • Download our starting config .txt file to C:/dev/fictrac/sample/ and .py Phidget helper file to C:/dev/fictrac/scripts/ respectively.
  • Clone matlab-panels to your computer and add this to your Matlab path
    • Create a panels pattern, possibly by using the example Matlab code provided
    • Burn your pattern to an SD card as instructed here using an SD card reader and your computer.
  • In order to use the serial port on the controller box you need to install the FDI driver.

Software testing#

We will need to test FicTrac, your pane code for the G3 arena and both together in closed-loop.

  • Fictrac
    • Copy all the files on the Wilson lab drive at fictrac_debug\to C:\dev\fictrac\sample\
    • f
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