NOTE: I am no longer actively developing Maestro or its related Matlab utilities. I have made this small
repo available for anyone in the neuroscience community that continues to use Maestro and might wish to fork the
repo to adapt the maestrodoc() script for their own use.
Designing experimental protocols in Maestro's user interface can become quite tedious, particularly when it
requires defining many complex trials involving many segments and more than a few participating targets. If the trials
vary with the response characteristics of the neural unit acquired during an experiment, it may be impossible to edit
the trial definitions before the unit is "lost". To address these concerns, the Matlab M-function maestrodoc() was
introduced in May 2010 to support script-based generation of an entire Maestro experiment document. It allows you
to specify all aspects of an experiment except for Continuous-mode stimulus runs, and saves the document in a
JSON file format that Maestro (as of v2.6.0) can import.
For further details and usage information, see the online Maestro user's guide.
The maestrodoc() function is implemented by a Matlab script, maestrodoc.m, and an accompanying Java class, JMXDoc.
The JMXDoc class file and a small JavaScript Object Notation (JSON) library,org.json, are archived together in
hhmi-ms-maestro.jar, which must be added to Matlab's Java class path for maestrodoc() to work. An Ant build file,
release.xml, prepares this JAR file and packages it in a ZIP file with maestrodoc.m and a sample script,
examplemdoc.m, that demonstrates how to use maestrodoc() to generate a Maestro JMX experiment document. This
ZIP file is available for download from the Maestro user's
guide.
The repo is set up as an IntelliJ IDEA project. If you wish to make your own changes, clone/fork this repo to your machine, make it an IntelliJ IDEA project, and start coding!
The maestrodoc() script and its supporting JAR were created by Scott Ruffner. It is licensed under the terms of
the MIT license.
Maestro and related Matlab utilties like maestrodoc() were developed for and with funding provided by the Stephen G. Lisberger laboratory in the Department of Neurobiology at Duke University.