LabMaestro Pack&Go is VPixx’s online platform for running MATLAB/Psychtoolbox-3 experiments remotely. Pack&Go is meant to offer researchers a versatile and easy solution for online experimentation. Crucially, you can upload any local MATLAB experiment on Pack&Go, with little to no modification required. Moreover, Pack&Go is an extensible solution and will eventually offer the possibly to upload experiments in Python as well as experiments created with our very own LabMaestro Experiment Builder (coming soon!).
This VOCAL guide is the first of a series on our Pack&Go streaming service and is intended to help you get started. We start by listing a few considerations to keep in mind when preparing an experiment to upload on Pack&Go. Then, we provide information on how to setup an account on the Pack&Go scientist portal. Finally, this guide features a follow-along video tutorial on how to upload and run a MATLAB experiment on Pack&Go.A few considerations
- Make sure you include all your data files, image files and dependencies.
- Your main experiment file should be a script, not a function.
- If your experiment contains subfolders, remember to replace any local file paths in your code with relative paths. Do not hardcode your file paths.
- To retrieve the full path to the Pack&Go working directory, use the pwd function, not the mfilename one. The latter will create an error.
- Pack&Go does not support the MATLAB addpath function.
- Save all result files in the main experiment folder. Do not create result subfolders.
- Pack&Go runs on a remote server with an optimized Linux X64 operating system. If you are using third-party MEX files in your experiment, make sure you specifically include Linux X64 MEX files.
Quick tip: Pack&Go will automatically point to the main experiment folder; when setting up relative paths to subfolders, you can start indexing from the first subfolder and use, for example, the MATLAB filesep function to add platform-specific file separators when needed.
We are working on a Pack&Go FAQ that will feature additional information, tips and troubleshooting tricks. The link will be posted here when it becomes available.
If you have technical questions about Pack&Go, you can always reach out to our team of trained vision scientists at [email protected].
Create an account
To use Pack&Go, you must first create a MyVPixx account. This can be done at any time, and you are only required to input an email address and password. The same MyVPixx account can be used for all of VPixx’s LabMaestro software, including the LabMaestro Hardware Simulator and Experiment Builder.
Once your account is created, you can login to the Pack&Go Scientist Portal to get started. There, the very first step will be to navigate to the “Transactions” tab and purchase some credits (the minimum transaction amount is 50 credits). 1 credit is equivalent to 1 USD. Usage fees to run an experiment are 3 credits per hour, billed by the minute. At each run, a minimum of 15 minutes will be charged to cover server baseline costs. This means that if your experiment is shorter than 15 minutes, you will be charged for 15 minutes. You must maintain a minimum balance of 10 credits to test run or publish an experiment. Credits will not be consumed during test runs.
If you have any account-related questions, you can contact our sales department at [email protected].
Setup an experiment
Now that you have created an account, let’s try an experiment using Pack&Go.
The following video guide will walk you through the process of creating, reviewing, publishing and downloading results for a MATLAB experiment on Pack&Go.