NI4461 signal interruption

[nelle178]

I am using a NI4461 card to generate waveforms for auditory stimulation in a rodent behavioral experiment. The animal is being trained to respond to a sound change that occurs at a certain timepoint from stimulus onset. As part of the training, we need to punish early responses by re-starting or aborting the sound. Is there a way to interrupt the production of a stimulus (4 sec-long) from the card after it has already been triggered by a TTL pulse? Sending a new TTL trigger while the first stimulus is still being generated does not seem to be able to re-start stimulus presentation...

Thanks!

Elena

[Carmen_Martinez]

Hello,

I found the property on the DAQmx trigger node that will help you to do the generation as you described. You have to use the trigger property node and then select more, pause trigger type. Here you have the link to the help:

http://zone.ni.com/reference/en-XX/help/370469AA-01/daqmxprop/attr1366/

Then you can define several pause modes, among them: analog level, analog window, digital level, digital pattern and none. I have added an image showing how you can find this trigger property.

I hope this helps!

[nelle178]

Thank you so much, Carmen! Trying it now.

[Carmen_Martinez]

I am happy to help! Keep me updated with the results!

I want to know if you managed to set your experiments up with the mice!

Have a nice day!

[nelle178]

A follow-up question: instead of pausing the AO task, is there a way to trigger it to restart it before completion? As an example, if the card is producing a four-second sound waveform, can a trigger be sent at t = 2 sec to restart stimulus production, resulting in a 6 second-long sound overall? (would a combination of DAQmx Stop Task VI and DAQmx Start Task VI need to be used)?

Thanks again,

Lena

[Carmen_Martinez]

You don't need to pause the task manually. Everything will be managed by the trigger. Or maybe I didn't understand the scenario.

Maybe those examples can clarify the how to do it for you:

http://search.ni.com/nisearch/app/main/p/bot/no/ap/tech/lang/en/pg/1/sn/catnav:ex/q/pause%20trigger/

Let me know if it helps!