Support & Troubleshooting

Neuropixels probes are provided to the Neuroscience research community at low cost on a not-for-profit basis. All technical and user support is based on a community support model. The information below should help you become a proficient user as quickly as possible and provides several troubleshooting guidelines.

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Training

New users are encouraged to attend one of the regularly organized user workshops or training courses prior to using the probes. Courses are currently offered by University College London through a grant by the Wellcome Trust and generously supported by the Sainsbury-Wellcome Centre.

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User Manual

Carefully read the Neuropixels User Manual before attempting to install, operate and use the probes. 

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Community

Please take advantage of the growing knowledge base shared on various online collaboration platforms:

The Neuropixels Slack channel and a GitHub Wiki curated by Nick Steinmetz are available. In addition, both SpikeGLX and Open Ephys are helpful information sources. 

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Advanced Users

Together with your probe delivery you will also receive contact details of a Neuropixels Superuser/Specialist in your local geography whom you can contact for technical questions and support.  

 

In the unfortunate event that your probe is defective and/or non-functional your Neuropixels Superuser/Specialist will confirm this to IMEC directly. IMEC will then contact you and discuss a suitable remedy and process to make sure that you have functional Neuropixels probes. Please wait until an IMEC Neuropixels representative contacts the person who ordered the probes, and please correspond ONLY with the designated person from IMEC who reaches out to you. This will be the fastest and most efficient mechanism for you to resolve issues with your Neuropixels probes. Please do not contact IMEC directly at any of the generic IMEC email contact information addresses.

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Design Files

Part of the system is open source and can be downloaded via GitHub.

Technical drawing of the aluminum metal cap (file).

Technical drawing for the 0.25 inch stereotactic rod to hold metal cap dovetail probes (file), design by HHMI (link).  

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Selected Publications

• JJ Jun et al, “Fully integrated silicon probes for high-density recording of neural activity,” Nature (551) 2017: pp. 232-236 (online)

• CM Lopez et al, “A 966-electrode neural probe with 384 configurable channels in 0.13µm SOI CMOS,” IEEE ISSCC 2016 (online)

• NA Steinmetz et al, "Challenges and opportunities for large-scale electrophysiology with Neuropixels probes," Current Opinion in Neurobiology (50) 2018: pp 92-100 (online)

• J. Putzeys et al. “Neuropixels Data-Acquisition System: A Scalable Platform for Parallel Recording of 10 000+ Electrophysiological Signals”, IEEE Transactions on Biomedical Circuits and Systems (Volume: 13 , Issue: 6 , Dec. 2019) (online)