User Reference:Operator Notes
Overview
Often it is desirable to take informal notes during a recording. BCI2000 allows to do so by providing
- an Operator window for text entry,
- a defined format for saving notes with recorded data,
- support for displaying and navigating recorded notes in the BCI2000Viewer tool.
Taking Notes during recording in Operator
The Notes window consists of a status message at the top, followed with a message view in the center, and an edit field for entering messages at the bottom.
When opening the Notes window while BCI2000 is idle or suspended, it will display a status message in red, saying than notes will not be saved. Still, it will allow for entering messages, which will appear in grey within the message view.
During a BCI2000 run (i.e., while a recording takes place), the status message will be green, and messages will appear in black when moving into the message view.
Whenever the user presses "Enter", the current message will be moved to the message view and displayed with a timestamp. Also, it will be written to a notes file that is saved along with the data file. At the same time, the Notes event will be set to the ordinal number (1-based number) of the note being saved.
Note storage and file format
Notes are stored in text files, located at the same directory as a run's output file. Their naming is the same as for data files, except that the infix _notes appears before the extension, and the extension is .txt.
Thus, notes files are named as in the following examples:
name001R02.dat name001R02_notes.txt name001R02.part2.dat name001R02_notes.part2.txt
In the notes file, each line is terminated with CRLF, and corresponds to a single note. Also, each line begins with to time stamps, separated by tab characters:
- an absolute timestamp in ISO 8601 extended format, and
- a relative timestamp since the beginning of the associated data file, in hours:minutes:seconds format.