Sleep Manipulation And Communication Clickything

A clickable interface for running sleep-related experiments.

• Trigger audio cues
• Collect dream reports
• Trigger EEG portcodes
• Save a detailed event log
• and more!

Installation

Get Python

Download either Anaconda or Miniconda. I prefer Miniconda, which is a much smaller install. If you're only using Python for SMACC, just get Miniconda.

Get SMACC

1. Open the Powershell app on your PC with Admin privileges (Right-click to open and select Run as administrator).
2. Create a new conda environment, so that our installation is isolated from the rest of your system. Also we need to make sure we use Python 3.8. Type conda create -n smacc python=3.8 and hit Enter.
3. Activate the environment you just created. Type conda activate smacc and hit Enter.
4. Install SMACC! Type pip install 'smacc[port_triggers]' and hit Enter. If you do not plan to use port triggers, use only pip install smacc instead.
5. Generate some sound files to use for cueing. You can add your own, but this is just to get started and make sure everything works. Type python -m smacc generate_cues and hit Enter. That creates a simple beep cue. Now to make a pink-noise file for masking cues, Type python -m smacc generate_noise and hit Enter.
6. If planning to use parallel port, download InpOut32. Type python -m smacc download_inpout and hit Enter.

Usage

Optional setup

These steps must be done before running SMACC.

SMACC will create a folder in your home directory, and then 3 folders in within that. It will look like this.

Users/<username>/smacc_data/cues  # <-- Any .wav file in here is made available as a cue to play with SMACC
Users/<username>/smacc_data/logs  # <-- Data .log files are saved here.
Users/<username>/smacc_data/noise # <-- The pink noise file is saved here.

If you don't want to use the default ~/smacc_data folder, you can change this by setting a new environment variable called SMACC_DATA_DIRECTORY equal to whatever directory you want to use. SMACC will create it and all the subfolders (if not already present).

• Place any sound files in the ~/smacc_data/cues folder (must be .wav files!).

There is a Record Dream Report button that will start to record from whatever external recording device is selected from the SMACC menubar. There is also an option to have it pop open a website URL. I use this to open up a dream report survey I have set up on Qualtrics. If you want it to open something, update the SURVEY_URL variable in config.py.

Run SMACC

# Make sure the conda environment is active.
conda activate smacc

# Run SMACC.
python -m smacc

• Test the setup by trying to play some cues.
• If planning to record dreams, choose sound device for recording audio from the menubar (Audio > Input device > [choose device]).