ZMQInterface

A plugin for open-ephys enabling the interfacing of ZeroMQ clients to open ephys.

Forked from anjaldoshi's github repository.

The interface exposes all data and events and allows to provide events to the application, enabling the creation of advanced visualization and monitoring add-ons.

The code in the examples under the python_clients directory may serve as tutorial for now. Note that the application may be written in any language/platform supporting ZeroMQ.

This repository also contains the source code from the old EventBroadcaster and NetworkEvents, which may be removed in the future.

Installation Instruction

The original plugin is compatible with the Linux, MacOSX versions of Open Ephys. The plugin was ported to Visual Studio/Windows and updated in 2018-2019 to a current Open Ephys version with modified plugin architecture. Some features were disabled during the process.

Compile from source code

The Plugin is organized so that it can be compiled as much as possible outside of the main open-ephys source tree. Under Linux, a symlink to the Source/Plugins directory is however necessary.

To compile, extract in a folder just outside the Open Ephys plugin-GUI source tree e.g.

$ ls src
plugin-GUI/
ZMQInterface/
etc...

Call cmake in the Build folder with the appropriate generator for your platform:

cmake -G "<GENERATOR>" .. #for Windows and MacOS
cmake -G "<GENERATOR>" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release .. #for Linux

can be one of the following options:

• "Visual Studio 12 2013 Win64"

• "Visual Studio 14 2015 Win64"

• "Visual Studio 15 2017 Win64"

• "Xcode"

• "Unix Makefiles"

  • For linux you may need to set the GCC version before calling cmake, as gcc-9 is not support in the current version of JUCE used by open-ephys

    export CC=gcc-8
    export CXX=g++-8
    

After generating the build files, the actual building process depends on your platform

Linux

• In the Build folder, call make and then make install

Windows

• Open OE_ZMQ.sln and compile the solution

MacOS

• Open the OE_ZME.xcodeproj and build the ALL_BUILD target

Binary installation

Binary files are provided in the bin folder of this repository. The Linux file is compiled in Ubuntu 19 with gcc-8. Windows binary is compiled with Visual Studio 2015, MacOS binary is built with Xcode 11.2.1 Note: due to the latest change of how open-ephys organize its plugins, you may need to compile the open-ephys GUI from source first to be able to use this plugin.

Windows and Linux

• Copy the binary file of respective platform (.so for Linux, .dll for Windows) to the plugins directory of open-ephys

MacOS

• Copy the .bundle files to ~/Library/Application Support/open-ephys/PlugIns
• Note: you need to use the latest open-ephys GUI. The plugin has been tested on 0.4.5