Mac sound I/O for stimulation/recording?

[Joseph Strout]

	I'm looking to make a simple cell stimulation/recording rig.  
I'll only need one analog output (a signal to stimulate the cell via an 
intracellular electrode) and one input (which I'll use to detect and 
count spikes; subthreshold potential changes are mostly irrelevant to my 
purposes).
	It occurs to me that I could use the sound I/O hardware built 
into any Mac in the last few years to accomplish this, with very little 
other hardware (except an amplifier or two, of course).  I've already 
hooked the headphone jack to an oscilloscope and find that it generates a 
nice, fairly clean arbitrary waveform of about 1V amplitude.  I haven't 
tried the input yet.
	Has anyone used a Mac in this manner?  Or something similar?  It 
seems almost too simple: no stimulus generator, no recorder, all under 
software control.  I'd appreciate any tips and advice you might have.

Thanks,
Joe Strout

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|    Joseph J. Strout           Department of Neuroscience, UCSD   |
|    jstrout at ucsd.edu           http://www-acs.ucsd.edu/~jstrout/  |
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