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Photometry (planned)

Design stage

Fibre-photometry integration is not fully shipped. MSW provides the building blocks (a shared session container, an acquisition manifest, and TTL barcode sync), but there is no turnkey msw photometry command or bundled photometry host plugin yet. This page describes the intended approach and the current limitations. For the full design discussion see Multi-Acquisition & Photometry.

Intended approach

Photometry is treated as a second acquisition recorded in parallel with MSW behaviour inside a shared session container, aligned afterwards by TTL barcodes. Two integration levels are envisaged:

MSW and the photometry system record independently. MSW emits TTL barcodes on a BNC output; the photometry rig records the same barcode line on a digital input. The photometry files are saved into a parallel acquisition folder inside the MSW session container, and the barcodes align the two streams offline — no direct software coupling required. See Barcode Sync.

<session_container>/
├── acquisition_manifest.yaml
├── <msw_behaviour_acquisition>/     ← MSW behaviour
└── <photometry_acquisition>/        ← photometry, aligned via barcodes

Photometry as an MSW host plugin

If the photometry system exposes an API (HTTP/ZMQ), it can implement the MSW HostSessionProtocol and register a msw.host entry point, so msw run --host photometry:<url> attaches recording lifecycle to the task. This path is sketched in the concept page but is not shipped as a bundled plugin.

Current limitations

  • No bundled photometry command or plugin. There is no msw photometry subcommand and no shipped photometry host plugin; the passive-recording path above is the practical option today.
  • Single host per run. Only one --host may be attached to a run, so photometry-as-host and Open Ephys-as-host cannot both be plugins in the same session. Use passive parallel recording for the second system.
  • No cross-acquisition alignment helpers. MSW supplies TTL barcodes as the alignment primitive; automatic cross-stream timestamp alignment is not yet part of the MSW post-processing API. Decode and align with ttl-barcoder directly.

See also