Software

The lab uses the following core software programs. While individuals are welcome to use other software on their own, it is critical for collaboration for everyone to use the same software. We therefore strongly encourage users to work in these environments when preparing manuscripts and other collaborative documents:

• Python for data processing and visualization. We recommend installing the Anaconda distribution which will install useful packages and development environments along with the Python interpreter.
• Spyder IDE comes bundled with Anaconda and is designed for scientific computing, variable inspection, inline plotting, and code dev tools useful for data analysis.
• MS Office for word processing and spreadsheets (Wash U IT will install MS Office on all machines)
• Affinity Designer for figure layouts.
• Zotero for reference management. This is free software that works excellently for managing and working with references. See nice tutorial video on it here.
• Bambu Studio for 3D printing preparation. This program is used to slice and prepare 3D models for our Bambu printers (X1Carbon, H2D, and P1S), supporting multi-material prints and monitoring capabilities.
• Arduino IDE for programming and uploading firmware to FED3 and other microcontroller-based devices. Setup Instructions
• Slack for internal lab communication. Slack is used for messaging, project updates, and file sharing across the lab. All members should join the lab workspace.

Additional software that can be purchased as needed includes:

• Graphpad Prism for making figures. This can be purchased through the Becker Library.
• NeuroExplorer for spike train analysis. The lab owns ~5 licenses and they are costly so we may need to share if more than 5 users wish to use this.