XY Viewer

An Open Ephys GUI plugin that plots one continuous channel against another in real time, e.g. for phase-plane / phase-portrait style views of two related signals. The trace fades from faint to solid along its length, so the most recent samples stand out from the older ones still in the retention window.

Acquisition Board -> XY Viewer

Usage

Add XY Viewer (under Sinks) to the signal chain. In the editor, pick a stream and choose the X and Y channels from the two dropdowns, and set the retention period; the canvas plots Y vs X for the selected pair, redrawing continuously during acquisition.

The plot is interactive: scroll to zoom, drag to pan, and use the Rescale button to fit the view back to the current data. Channel selection, retention period, and the current pan/zoom range are all restored the next time the signal chain is loaded.

Installation

Prebuilt DLLs/shared libraries for each release are available on the Releases page.

1. Download the archive for your platform (xy-viewer-windows-*.zip or xy-viewer-linux-*.tar.gz) and extract the plugin file (xy-viewer.dll / xy-viewer.so).
2. Copy it into one of the Open Ephys GUI's plugin directories:
   • The plugins folder next to the GUI executable (open-ephys.exe on Windows), e.g. C:\Program Files\Open Ephys\plugins\.
   • Or, per-user (no install permissions needed):
     • Windows: %LOCALAPPDATA%\Open Ephys\plugins-api10\
     • Linux: ~/.config/open-ephys/plugins-api10/
3. (Re)start the Open Ephys GUI — XY Viewer should now appear under Sinks in the processor list.

Parameters

Name	Scope	Default	Notes
Retention (ms)	Processor	2000	How much trace history (in ms) to keep on screen, 100–10000

Building

Requires the Open Ephys GUI checked out as a sibling directory, or the GUI_BASE_DIR environment variable pointing at it:

open-ephys/
├── plugin-GUI/
└── OEPlugins/
    └── xy-viewer/

Windows

Requirements: Visual Studio and CMake

From the Build directory:

cmake -G "Visual Studio 17 2022" -A x64 ..

Open the generated OE_PLUGIN_xy-viewer.sln in Visual Studio, select a configuration (Debug/Release), and build the solution. Building the INSTALL project copies the .dll into the GUI's plugins directory.

Linux

Requirements: CMake

From the Build directory:

cmake -G "Unix Makefiles" -DCMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=Release ..
make -j
make install

macOS

Requirements: Xcode and CMake

From the Build directory:

cmake -G "Xcode" ..

Open the generated xy-viewer.xcodeproj in Xcode and run the ALL_BUILD / INSTALL schemes.

License

GPL-3.0. See LICENSE.