Hello Jason,

So I have extensively looked into this, and it seems that the virtual serial port does not have an address. In the control panel and under ports, it doesn't have a resources tab- I am assuming it lacks a location because it is a virtual port!

However it is odd that it send the TTL files anyways. The equipment all works perfectly fine, and adding a comport.txt file allows me to use the <> parameters to input a TTL signal, but only if I put a single character into it; for example <c> sends the trigger 99. I believe its an ASCII conversion. If you could give me some more information as to why the TTLs would work, that would be very helpful! As I said though, the format of <100:888:5> will not work, presumably because the port address location is incorrect. I asked the developers of the virtual serial port software and they said there is no way to determine the HEX port address of the ports.

Just some more information about our setup, we have a program that creates virtual serial port connection, it allows two programs to communicate without a physical serial port. One of our pieces of equipment is a wireless EEG headset, it received markers from Medialab via this virtual serial port program. It creates a pair of ports called COM4 and COM5, where COM4 sends signals and COM5 receives. I believe with the comport.txt file, I have to edit the first number to 4 in order for the TTLs to send. Let me know if this all makes sense!

Alex

Quote Originally Posted by jason_reed View Post
Alex,

Could you please clarify a few points for me?

1) Is everything actually functional with your experiment or is there an issue of something broken?
2) Could you please elaborate on what you mean by saying that the program properly sends a trigger at the onset of the stimulus? Does that mean the COM port? Does only the value of <1> work when used in the parameters field of a MediaLab item or do other numbers by themselves work or not? Or does 1 not work when adding port address or time?

Also, the numbers you mentioned are not port addresses, but most likely baud rates. I'm not that familiar with virtual ports, but you should be able to find the addresses like normal ports. Here's how to find it with ports actually installed on your computer:

1) Click the Start button.
2) Click on Control Panel.
3) In that Control Panel window, click on Device Manager.
4) Click on Ports to expand it and double-click on the specific port for which you want to know the address.
5) Click the Resources tab in the new window. Look for the entry that reads I/O Range. To the right of it in the Settings column you will see a potential range of port address in hexidecimal value (e.g., 60E0 to 60E7). If you put them individually in a hex to decimal converter like this one http://www.binaryhexconverter.com/he...imal-converter you should get the decimal values. You can then try each of these decimal values in your DirectRT .csv input file to see if it sends the ttl signal value defined in your stim column to your external devices.

See if there is something similar for your virtual ports and let me know if you have any questions.