TENSS Electronics Practical

A hands-on electronics practical for the TENSS summer school, building up an extracellular electrophysiology recording circuit from first principles to a full working system.

Instructor: Antonin Blot, Jon Newman, Ale Cámera, Jakob Voigts, Mitra Javadzadeh etc..

Since 2018, I co-organise part of the “Ephys and Behaviour” module of TENSS. Over the years many instructors contributed to the main practicals that walks through building a small amplifier able to record extracellular signals (namely spikes from a cockroach leg). We start from basic components (resistors, capacitors, op-amps) and working up through passive filters, voltage followers, active filters, and differential amplification to a full recording circuit.

Practicals

Lectures

I list only the lecture that I gave, if you are interested in more of the course material feel free to contact me and I’ll redirect you to the relevant instructors.

  1. Module introduction: Why do we do that? What is electricity? Passive circuits
  2. Active circuits: Op amps & Voltage buffers
  3. Where does the extracellular potential come from?
  4. Synchronisation