martinesparza/plugin-demo

Processor Plugin Template

This repository contains a template for building Processor plugins for the Open Ephys GUI. This is the most common type of plugin for the GUI, and makes it possible to add custom functionality to the signal chain.

Information on the Open Ephys Plugin API can be found on the GUI's documentation site.

Creating a new Processor Plugin

1. Click "Use this template" to instantiate a new repository under your GitHub account.
2. Clone the new repository into a directory at the same level as the plugin-GUI repository. This is typically named OEPlugins, but it can have any name you'd like.
3. Modify the OpenEphysLib.cpp file to include your plugin's name and version number.
4. Create the plugin build files using CMake.
5. Use Visual Studio (Windows), Xcode (macOS), or make (Linux) to compile the plugin.
6. Edit the code to add custom functionality, and add additional source files as needed.

Using external libraries

To link the plugin to external libraries, it is necessary to manually edit the Build/CMakeLists.txt file. The code for linking libraries is located in comments at the end. For most common libraries, the find_package option is recommended. An example would be

find_package(ZLIB)
target_link_libraries(${PLUGIN_NAME} ${ZLIB_LIBRARIES})
target_include_directories(${PLUGIN_NAME} PRIVATE ${ZLIB_INCLUDE_DIRS})

If there is no standard package finder for cmake, find_libraryand find_path can be used to find the library and include files respectively. The commands will search in a variety of standard locations For example

find_library(ZMQ_LIBRARIES NAMES libzmq-v120-mt-4_0_4 zmq zmq-v120-mt-4_0_4) #the different names after names are not a list of libraries to include, but a list of possible names the library might have, useful for multiple architectures. find_library will return the first library found that matches any of the names
find_path(ZMQ_INCLUDE_DIRS zmq.h)

target_link_libraries(${PLUGIN_NAME} ${ZMQ_LIBRARIES})
target_include_directories(${PLUGIN_NAME} PRIVATE ${ZMQ_INCLUDE_DIRS})

Providing libraries for Windows

Since Windows does not have standardized paths for libraries, as Linux and macOS do, it is sometimes useful to pack the appropriate Windows version of the required libraries alongside the plugin. To do so, a libs directory has to be created at the top level of the repository, alongside this README file, and files from all required libraries placed there. The required folder structure is:

    libs
    ├─ include           #library headers
    ├─ lib
        ├─ x64           #64-bit compile-time (.lib) files
        └─ x86           #32-bit compile time (.lib) files, if needed
    └─ bin
        ├─ x64           #64-bit runtime (.dll) files
        └─ x86           #32-bit runtime (.dll) files, if needed

DLLs in the bin directories will be copied to the open-ephys GUI shared folder when installing.