This website provides the technical and implementation details for Airtrack.

Airtrack was first published in the paper titled Air-Track: a real-world floating environment for active sensing in head-fixed mice in Journal of Neurophysiology 1 October 2016 Vol. 116. The paper can also be found on ResearchGate.

Airtrack was developed in LARKUM Lab by Mostafa Nashaat, Hatem Oraby, Robert Sachdev, York Winter and Matthew Larkum. Alexander Schill, engineer at Charité workshop (CWW) had a significant contribution to the design of the platform and the airtrack table.

Website is still in beta

This means that we haven't fully finished building the website yet, still we cover the basics needed to build a fully operational air-track platform.

The final release of the website will contain a step-by-step guide on how to build the platform and connect the hardware as well as a more detailed explanation on how to configure code to fit your needs.

Electronics and Arduino board Schematics


The following are the used electronics:

  • Arduino Uno microcontroller
  • H Bridge(L293D)
  • 50-mm linear actuator with position feedback (model L16 50N 35:1 12V, Firgelli Technologies)
  • Two solenoids (2-way normally closed pinch valves, BioChem Fluidics)
  • Two capacitive touch sensor modules (MPR121, Freescale Semiconductors)
  • Active buzzer module (KY-012, KEYES DIY)
  • 3v or 5v white rectangle-shaped LED
  • 12-V direct current (DC) power supply (for linear actuator and solenoids)
  • Pixy (CMUcam5) camera

Platform Design & Measurements

This is an illustrative image of the airtrack

The following video illustrates the airtrack table design and the placement of the different components.

Table & Platform Measurements

The platform size should be customized according to your needs. The only thing to note is that as the table size increases, the more air lifting power is needed. Accordingly, the material used to build the air table should withstand the air pressure pushed through it.

As a preliminary guide until we launch the website final version, the following are different measurement documents and CAD files for two different sizes of the air-track table:

Please look at both PDF files as their content differ in the levels of details of the information.

Please get in contact if you have any questions.

Code

The code for Arduino can be found on Air-track git-hub page.

Get Updates / Contact Us

Use the form below to contact us or just leave your email below with an empty message to get notified once the full version of the website is launched.