The main goal of Bonsai is to simplify and accelerate the development of software for acquiring and processing the many heterogeneous data sources commonly used in (neuro) scientific research. Here we describe Bonsai, an open-source visual programming framework for processing data streams (Box 1). This limits the ability to rapidly prototype and try out new designs and can quickly become the factor limiting the kinds of questions that are amenable to scientific investigation. Moreover, it requires experimenters to pursue specialized training outside their domain of research. These difficulties lead to increased development times when setting up an experiment. Integration of these diverse software and hardware components remains a major challenge for researchers. In addition, the growth of the open-source movement has greatly increased the number of freely available technologies for different data processing domains. Each hardware vendor provides their own set of drivers and programming interfaces for configuring and acquiring data from their devices.

However, the serial nature of programming instructions and shared memory makes it a challenge, even for experienced programmers, to develop software that can elegantly deal with the asynchronous, parallel nature of scientific data.Īnother challenge arises from the need for software integration. General purpose digital computers have gradually replaced many of the specialized analog and digital technologies used for this kind of data acquisition and experiment control, largely due to the flexibility of programming and the exponential growth in computing power. Multiple measurement devices, from video cameras, microphones, and pressure sensors to neural electrodes, must simultaneously send their data in real-time to a recording system.

Modern scientific experiments crucially depend on the control and monitoring of many parallel streams of data.

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