Doing real experiments
======================

Structure
---------

For highly complex experiments it is useful to split the scripts
into several files. We normally try to follow the scheme below.

Folders:

:Results:
    contains pickles of the results under nicely-named folders
:biases:
    bias (text) files of the chips
:setupfiles:
    xml files of the setups (*)
:chipfiles:
    csv and xml files representing the chips (*)

(*) these folders are usually in a common folder somewhere else because they are
  not experiment dependent.

Files and correspondent actions:

:expSetup:
    load the setup
:expMap:
    prepare connectivity
:expPop:
    create populations
:expStim:
    load data set and convert into AER
:expTools:
    useful functions, code snippets, ...
:expOsc:
    prepare acquisition of analog signals if needed
:expMon:
    define monitors (?)
:expRun:
    run the experiment and save values
:expData:
    analysis of the data
:expPlot:
    plot data

Experiment tools
----------------

We developed a specific class to save the data of our experiments.

Save
~~~~

::

    et = pyNCS.et
    et.mksavedir() # creates a new folder under Results/
    et.globaldata.variable_to_be_saved = v1
    et.globaldata.an_other_one = v4
    et.save() # saves everything from globaldata and all expXXX scripts.

Some comments. The ``Results`` folder has to be created in advance. The function
``mksavedir`` creates, by default, a folder of the format ``NNN__DD-MM-YYYY``.
You can assign every `pickable` variable you want to globaldata attributes. The
``save`` function saves:

- all the python files starting by ``exp`` in a single ``tar.gz``
  file inside the new folder
- a single pickle of ``et.globaldata``
- an empty file with the time of the experiment as name

.. warning:: Don't forget to save chip biases!

Load
~~~~

::

    loaded_data = pyNCS.et
    et.globaldata.directory = 'Results/128__19-04-2011'
    et.globaldata = et.globaldata.load()

The ``load`` functions grabs the pickle from the specified directory. You can
find the variables you saved in ``et.globaldata``.