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% RaspberryPiSetup -- How to setup your Pi optimally for Psychtoolbox.
%
% There are two major families of the RaspberryPi with features suitable for
% meaningful use for visual and auditory stimulation with Psychtoolbox-3, the
% older variants RaspberryPi 2 and 3, and the new RaspberryPi 4/400 family.
%
% Psychtoolbox is currently only tested with up to date versions of the official
% RaspberryPi Linux operating system distribution known as "RaspberryPi OS", also
% known under its former name "Raspbian". Only 32-Bit Raspbian is supported by
% Psychtoolbox as provided directly by us via DownloadPsychtoolbox et al., even
% on 64-Bit processors. Whatever is the most recent stable Raspbian + GNU/Octave
% is what PTB will support, with some jiggle room, as we do not keep close track
% of development an updates to Raspbian. Raspbian itself also provides versions
% of Psychtoolbox, installable via "sudo apt install octave-psychtoolbox-3", and
% 64-Bit versions of Raspbian would ship such packages as 64-Bit packages. Other
% Linux distributions for RaspberryPi, like Ubuntu for RaspberryPi, will also
% ship Psychtoolbox packages as 32-Bit or 64-Bit variants via the sudo apt install
% octave-psychtoolbox-3 method. While these packages will likely work just fine,
% these are currently not tested by the Psychtoolbox developers, or supported in
% case of questions or problems. These packages are maintained by the NeuroDebian
% maintainers, and they are usually quite a bit out of date wrt. the current PTB
% beta releases, as the Linux distributions usually ship whatever PTB was the most
% recent version at a time sometime before the distributions was released. Those
% packages do not get updates after initial distribution release, not even bug
% fixes. E.g., Raspbian at early 2021 ships some Psychtoolbox 3.0.15 variant,
% whereas PTB betas are now at version 3.0.17 or later.
%
%
% The RaspberryPi 2B is tested for compatibility with Psychtoolbox. The test system
% is a RaspberryPi 2B with 1 GB of RAM. Other models of RaspberryPi 2 and 3 are
% expected to work equally well (or better for the more powerful RaspberryPi 3),
% but not tested. It provides:
%
% - 40 pin digital i/o, e.g., for TTL trigger emission or reception, hardware
% interfacing etc. See RaspberryPiGPIODemo.m for how to use it.
%
% - Working stereo audio output with ok latency and good timing via the headphone
% jack. Tested and verified by use of a VPixx Datapixx. Working audio output or
% input via UAC compliant USB audio cards.
%
% - Working video capture with external USB connected web cams.
%
% - Single display support via HDMI for up to 1920x1080 pixels full HD, with 8 bit
% of color precision, for standard 24 bit color depth / 16.8 Millions of colors,
% or 256 levels of red, green, blue, grey. No support for floating point framebuffers
% or textures, and thereby no support for stimulus drawing or post-processing
% which would require such buffers.
%
%
% The RaspberryPi 4, and its keyboard form-factor variant RaspberryPi 400, apart
% from providing more RAM and faster processor and graphics, do support:
%
% - 40 pin digital i/o, e.g., for TTL trigger emission or reception, hardware
% interfacing etc. See RaspberryPiGPIODemo.m for how to use it. Untested so far,
% but should work the same as on the RaspberryPi 2 and 3.
%
% - Presumably working stereo output like the RPi 2 and 3 on models with headphone
% jack. This is untested by us so far, but reasonable to assume it is working.
%
% - Audio output via HDMI audio: This is tested to be working for video playback
% with the Chrome webbrowser, and with Psychtoolbox built-in GStreamer based
% movie/video/audio playback engine. You can play back movies with sound, or
% sound files in common formats like .wav or .mp3 or .ogg audio etc., whatever
% is supported by GStreamer's collection of plugins.
%
% CAUTION: Audio output over HDMI via our PsychPortAudio driver currently does
% not work at all! Audio output over headphone jacks - if any - is supposed to
% work, but not tested. Working audio output or input via UAC compliant USB audio
% cards.
%
% - Working video capture with external USB connected web cams.
%
% - Dual-display support via two micro-HDMI connectors up to 4k UHD resolution.
% So far tested is single-display operation, due to lack of a 2nd adapter cable.
%
% The new VideoCore-6 gpu has slightly higher performance than the older VideoCore
% 4 gpu in RPi 2 and 3. More importantly, the gpu supports full 32 bit floating
% point framebuffers and textures, with the restriction that framebuffer blending/
% alpha-blending is only supported on 16 bit floating point framebuffers. This
% opens up many new use cases for more complex visual stimuli, e.g., it makes
% AdditiveBlendingForLinearSuperpositionTutorial.m demo work, as well as
% MorphDemo and MorphTextureDemo, FDFDemo, GarboriumDemo and ProceduralGarboriumDemo
% and various other complex shader-based or alpha-blending based stimuli. It also
% allows to take full advantage of high-end visual stimulators and display devices
% from VPixx, if you are inclined enough to drive a multi-thousand dollar stimulator
% with a 50$ microcomputer. Ofc. while accuracy is excellent, performance is more
% limited than with a desktop or laptop graphics card from Intel, AMD or NVidia.
% Testing showed that stimuli generated without use of alpha-blending can be output
% at the full 16 bit or 14 bit precision of VPixx or CRS visual stimulators, while
% stimuli created via alpha blending with 16 bit floating point framebuffers can
% achieve up to 11 bit precision, depending on specific stimulus.
%
% Movie playback of full HD video at 24 fps is possible with suitably encoded
% movies and proper playback settings. For playback of H264 encoded movies, the
% builtin H264 hardware decoder of the RaspberryPi 4 is used. You must specify
% an explicit 'pixelFormat' of 6 in Screen('OpenMovie', ...., pixelFormat); for
% this to work at good performance for high resolution movies. At default settings
% movie playback would be very slow, e.g., 1-2 fps for full HD content. Additionally,
% the H264 hardware decoder is picky wrt. proper content encoding. While footage
% e.g., from YouTube or other professionally encoded sources works, badly encoded
% footage may not. Regrettably our own included demo movie DualDiscs.mov, as used
% by SimpleMovieDemo and PlayMoviesDemo by default, does not work at all, the
% decoder chokes on it. Many other movie formats play back with software decoding,
% at potentially lower performance. To summarize: Good performance playback of HD
% content at good framerates works if you do everything right wrt. playback parameters
% and encoding. Otherwise your mileage may vary both wrt. performance and reliability.
%
%
% If you use Psychtoolbox with Raspbian, these setup steps are strongly recommended:
%
% 1. Update your Raspbian to the latest version "sudo apt update" and "sudo apt upgrade".
%
% 2. If you are on a RaspberryPi 4 or 400, make sure the Linux kernel is at least of
% version 5.10 or later. If "uname -a" reports a lower version, upgrade the kernel
% via "sudo rpi-update" and some reboot. This step is not needed for the RPi 2 and 3.
%
% 3. Switch from the firmware kms video driver to the proper fully open-source kms
% video driver. For this, edit the file /boot/config.txt - the section at the end,
% then reboot. The section should look like this on a RaspberryPi 4 / 400:
%
% [pi4]
% # Enable DRM VC4 V3D driver on top of the dispmanx display stack
% dtoverlay=vc4-kms-v3d-pi4
% max_framebuffers=2
% gpu_mem=256
%
% [all]
% gpu_mem=256
%
% You could increase gpu_mem to numbers larger than 256 MB if you run into
% graphics performance trouble or other glitches. Important for proper visual
% stimulation with proper timing and reliability is that the dtoverlay parameter is
% set to vc4-kms-v3d-pi4 instead of vc4-fkms-v3d.
%
% On a RaspberryPi 2 or 3, the dtoverlay parameter should be vc4-kms-v3d instead
% of vc4-fkms-v3d.
%
% 4. On the RaspberryPi 4 / 400 with editions of Raspbian / RaspberryPi OS older than
% February 2021, you should either update your OS to the latest, and reboot, or run
% PsychLinuxConfiguration, XOrgConfCreator, and XOrgConfSelector to install a custom
% xorg.conf file, which will work around a bug in Raspbian. Reboot! If the bug is
% present and this workaround from step 4 is not applied, Psychtoolbox will complain
% angrily about "pageflipping not being used for flips", visual stimulation timing
% will be grossly wrong, and you will observe massive tearing artifacts, flicker and
% other stimulus anomalies.
%
% With all setup steps performed properly, and a reboot for good measure, visual
% stimulation should work very well, with robust, trustworthy and sub-millisecond
% accurate visual stimulus onset timestamps, as verfied by us with external measurement
% equipment.
%
%
% In general, the RaspberryPi microcomputers are quite capable devices for neuroscience
% testing, even for many vision science paradigms. Their builtin gpio support makes them
% especially nifty if one needs to receive or send TTL triggers or other i/o.
%
% Further support for improvements to Psychtoolbox wrt. RaspberryPi devices, and
% user support will be contingent on labs financially supporting our work. Until
% then, consider this work being done on a low effort basis.
%
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