WinLTP - Frequently Asked Questions
1. Will WinLTP run on any boards other than the National Instruments M-Series PCI or the Axon Digidata 132x data acquisition boards?
There are no current plans for WinLTP to run the new Axon Digidata 1440A data acquisition board. And it is highly unlikely that WinLTP will run any of the CED data acquisition boards, or any of the Instrutech data acquisition boards. It's a lot of work installing a new type of data acquisition board in a multitasking program such as WinLTP.
Also, WinLTP can never support the National Instruments E-Series data acquisition boards because they do no have streaming digital output.
WinLTP will probably support the future National Instruments M-Series USB 3.0 data acquisition boards. The current M-Series USB 2.0 data acquisition boards have proved somewhat inadequate with WinLTP).
To me the M-series boards are functionally extremely good with WinLTP and come at a very reasonable price. In addition, the M-Series boards can run some other very good data acquisition including National Instruments' LabView, WaveMetrics' IGOR, John Dempster's Strathclyde Electrophysiology Suite (WinWCP and WinEDR), Silver lab's Nclamp, and QUB data acquisition.
2. Will WinLTP's author be willing to write any WinLTP scripts?
Yes, within reason. I know it can be extremely tough when trying to write scripts for a system you don't know anything about, so I'm glad to get users started in script programming. Plus, the script programming component of WinLTP is the part of WinLTP I'm most proud about (along with the multitasking - the rest is pretty much grunt work). And I think that the WinLTP scripting is bettered by few if any electrophysiology data acquisition systems.
3. What are the advantages of the M-Series PCI boards versus the Digidata 132x boards?
a) You can still buy the M-Series boards from National Instruments and will be able to for a long time into the future (NI still sells ISA bus boards)! Molecular Devices no longer sells the legacy Digidata 132x boards.
b) The delay in response to keyboard input for altering protocol values is much less for the M-Series PCI boards (0.5 sec) compared to the Digidata 132x boards (5.0 sec).
4. Will WinLTP reanalyze pop-spikes in binary multi-sweep pClamp ABF files?
No. Try the MiniAnalysis program from Synaptosoft or Axograph X by John Clements (which now works with Windows).
Or you could convert your multi-sweep ABF files to Axon Text Files (*.ATF), then convert the ATF file to multiple sweep ADsweep files using my ATF2SWPS.EXE utility and reanalyze pop-spikes with the DOS LTP Program (this capability is not yet in WinLTP), but this seems a round-about way to do this.