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:
- A 200x200 mm² airtrack table
- A 480x366 mm² airtrack table
Please get in contact if you have any questions.
Code
The code for Arduino can be found on Air-track git-hub page.
