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OSCAR: an open-source controller for animal research

Dastin-van Rijn, E. M.; Sachse, E.; Iacobucci, F.; Mensinger, M.; Widge, A.

2023-02-04 bioengineering
10.1101/2023.02.03.527033 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Operant animal behavior training and monitoring is fundamental to scientific inquiry across fields necessitating evaluation via controlled laboratory tasks. However, current commercial and open-source systems enforce particular hardware and software, limiting reproducibility and technique and data sharing across sites. To address this issue, we developed OSCAR: an open-source controller for animal research that enables flexible control of a variety of industry standard hardware with platform-independent software. OSCAR offers millisecond latency with a flexible array of inputs and outputs at a fraction of the cost of commercial options. These features position OSCAR as a valuable option for improving consistency of behavioral experiments across studies.

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