pylsl

This is the Python interface to the Lab Streaming Layer (LSL). LSL is an overlay network for real-time exchange of time series between applications, most often used in research environments. LSL has clients for many other languages and platforms that are compatible with each other.

Let us know if you encounter any bugs (ideally using the issue tracker on the GitHub project).

Installation

Prepared distributions

The following platforms are supported with direct installation from pypi using pip: pip install pylsl

Self-built

• You must first obtain a liblsl shared library for your platform.
  • You might be able to find the appropriate liblsl shared object (*.so on Linux, *.dylib on MacOS, or *.dll on Windows) from the liblsl release page.
  • Otherwise you might try to clone liblsl and use its standalone_compilation_linux.sh script (works on raspberry pi).
• Copy the shared object into liblsl-Python/pylsl/lib (use cp -L on platforms that use symlinks).
• From the liblsl-Python working directory, run pip install ..
  • Note: You can use pip install -e . to install while keeping the files in-place. This is convenient for developing pylsl.
• Please consider building a portable wheel with python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel and attaching the produced .whl file to a GitHub issue to benefit other users of the same platform.

Usage

See the examples in pylsl/examples. Note that these can be run directly from the commandline with (e.g.) python -m pylsl.examples.SendStringMarkers.

For maintainers

Continuous Integration

pylsl uses continuous integration and distribution.

Whenever a new commit is pushed, AppVeyor downloads liblsl from its releases page, copies it to the package, then builds wheels for distribution. This process is repeated for each of Windows, Mac, and Linux.

In addition, whenever a new git tag is used on a commit that is pushed to the master branch, the CI systems will deploy the wheels to pypi.

Manual Distribution

1. Manual way:
   1. rm -Rf build dist *.egg-info
   2. python setup.py sdist bdist_wheel
   3. Additional steps on Linux:
      • auditwheel repair dist/*.whl -w dist
      • rm dist/*-linux_x86_64.whl
   4. twine upload dist/*
2. For conda
   1. build liblsl: conda build ../liblsl/
   2. conda build .

Known Issues

• On Linux one currently cannot call pylsl functions from a thread that is not the main thread.

Acknowledgments

Pylsl was primarily written by Christian Kothe while at Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience, UCSD. The LSL project was funded by the Army Research Laboratory under Cooperative Agreement Number W911NF-10-2-0022 as well as through NINDS grant 3R01NS047293-06S1. pylsl is maintained primarily by Chadwick Boulay. Thanks for contributions, bug reports, and suggestions go to Bastian Venthur, David Medine, Clemens Brunner, and Matthew Grivich.