ANY-maze Help > The ANY-maze reference > The Protocol page > The elements of a protocol > Inputs and outputs > On/off outputs > An introduction to on/off outputs

An introduction to on/off outputs

Introduction

On/off outputs allow ANY-maze to switch things on and off during an experiment. For example, you could use an on/off output to turn on a 'cue light' in an operant chamber or to switch on (and off) a shocker in a fear conditioning experiment.

On/off outputs include any output that can be turned on or off, for example an AMi switch output, an ANY-maze Digital interface TTL output, or an ANY-maze Relay interface output.

Connecting the output

As you may know, a protocol can include I/O devices which are physical devices, such as the members of the ANY-maze interface device family, that provide the electronics necessary to connect inputs and outputs to your PC.

An on/off output is always part of some I/O device, and it is this device which actually connects to the thing being 'switched on and off'. Let's take the ANY-maze interfaces as an example, and let's assume we want to control two lamps in our experiment. For simplicity, we'll assume the lamps already have a mechanical switch which you can manually use to turn them on and off. So, what we need to do is replace this manual switch with some sort of 'computer controlled switch'. Fortunately, there's an electronic device that does exactly that; it's called a relay, and the ANY-maze Relay interface contains six of them. So in our case, we would simply need to remove the manual switches from our lamp circuit and in their place connect two of the ANY-maze interface relays - voilà! we would have two lamps that could be switched on and off by ANY-maze.

To set this up in our protocol, we would have to include the ANY-maze interface as an I/O device so that its output switches would then be available within our protocol. We would then need to include TWO on/off outputs in the protocol, one for each of the lamps. It is the on/off outputs which we would then be able to use to independently control the lamps during the tests.

Of course, this description glosses over the detail of exactly how we would connect the lamps to the ANY-maze interface, but that is described in the Connecting an ANY-maze Relay interface to your apparatus topic.

The ANY-maze Relay interface is not the only I/O device supported by ANY-maze - a full list can be found here.

Types of on/off output

A relay output is one type of on/off output, but there are others. For example, there are also Digital I/O (DIO) outputs - these provide a digital on/off signal which compatible electronics will understand. This type of signal is quite common on animal shockers (where it is often referred to as a TTL signal) and so by using an I/O device that supports this type of output, you could set up ANY-maze so it could control a shocker. A full description of the different types of on/off outputs can be found here.

Using the output

An on/off output protocol element represents a physical switch. When you set up the output, you give it a name and tell ANY-maze whether it should be on or off at the start of a test, and which I/O device it is part of. But that's not very useful, if it just means that ANY-maze will turn the output on (or off) at the start of every test - what you will probably want to do is to control the output during the test; perhaps switching it on in response to something the animal does.

Controlling an on/off output during a test is the job of a procedure. Procedures can be set up to detect when something happens in a test (for example, the animal enters a certain zone), and to then take an action because of it - which includes turning an output on or off.

Summary

On/off outputs are a little more complicated than other protocol elements because they usually require various other elements to be set up too in order to make them useful:

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You need to set up the I/O device that the output is physically part of

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You need to set up the on/off output itself

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