Multichannel Systems MC_Rack Manual - Manual (Page 53)

Step by Step Tutorial
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3.3.2 Monitoring Triggered Activity
Next, you need a Data Display for monitoring the ongoing activity.
Click on the toolbar or click Add Data Display on the Edit menu to add a Data Display
in series with the Trigger Detector to the virtual rack. (If you would put both instruments in
parallel, you would not be able to use the trigger stream generated by the Trigger Detector
for triggering the Data Display, because virtual instruments can only use the output streams
of other virtual instruments that are upstream in the virtual rack tree.)
The Data Display displays the channels in the layout of the Channel Map you have created
or loaded. Channel maps are saved as “*.cmp” files. The default channel map at first program
startup is the 8x8 grid of standard MEAs (saved as 8x8mea.cmp). When you have changed the
channel map, the last used channel map is loaded automatically as the default.
1. Define the display layout and select the data stream as explained before.
Triggering the display
To graph the sweeps synchronized to the stimulation, you need to start the display on the trigger
event generated by the Trigger Detector that we set up earlier.
1. In the tree view pane of the virtual rack, select the Display 1, and click the Window tab.
2. Select the option Start on Trigger.
In the Trigger selection box, Trigger 1 appears automatically. It is the only trigger data stream
available in this rack. (You could set up multiple Trigger Detectors and trigger multiple displays
on separate trigger events.)
Starting MC_Rack
 Click Start
(either on the Measurement menu, the toolbar, or the Rack tabbed page) to
start the data acquisition. Each virtual instrument in the rack starts to process the channels and
data streams that were assigned to it, that is, the Trigger Detector detects events on the digital
input channel and generates a trigger data stream that, in turn, triggers the display. The display
is refreshed at each trigger event.