PCIbex Farm

PCIbex Farm allows you to build and share your experiment easily with public.

The easiest way to use PCIbex, or PennController, is to use the PCIbex Farm server, which provides free hosting for PennController experiments. The PCIbex Farm hosts and builds PennController experiments automatically, meaning that you don’t have to worry about set up, and can focus on writing your experiment scripts.

You can also set up your own server by following the instructions in the Using an external server how-to guide.

Each PCIbex Farm account has a 64MB storage quota, meaning that the total size of all files across all experiments cannot exceed 64MB. If you exceed this limit, you will not be able to upload new files or save any changes.

To restore your account:

  • Delete files until total file size is under 64MB.
  • Send an email to support@pcibex.net to be taken off the exceed-quota list.

Creating a PCIbex Farm account

  1. Go to the PCIbex Farm.
  2. Click “Sign up” in the top bar
  3. A modal window pops up:
    • In the “Username” field, enter the username that you want for your account.
    • In the “Password” field, enter the password that you want for your account.
    • In the “Password confirmation”, re-enter the password that you used in the “Password” field.
    • In the “Email address” field, enter the email that you want to link your acccount to. PCIbex Farm does not share your email, and only sends emails for password retrieval purposes or server-maintenance-related announcements.
  4. Click Sign up.

Using PCIbex Farm

Script editor

Use the already givent templates or create the new code in the codespace. Every experiment is automatically saved and in order to preview it you can click either Refresh to see it right in the same tab or the button Open in new tab to see it in the new tab.

Use resources tab to add a new csv table or html file, scripts tab to add a new javascript file, aesthetics to add the design to your experiment by adding css files. PennController is located in the modules tab.

Actions

Actions are located on the right side of your script editor and they have following functions:

  • Results: To preview your results file
  • Share: Your projects come with a demonstration link so you can share them with people, whether it be to get feedback or help with troubleshooting, or to let readers of your publications take your experiment and easily replicate your study.
    Once you are ready to collect data, give the data-collection link to your participants: the results will be saved separately.
  • Download: To download project to your device
  • Git sync: To import existing git repository to your project
  • Settings: To add a description to your experiment and to change whether the project can be cloned or not

Debugger

Debug window will show all the potential errors in your code/development.

It is strongly recommended that you keep the Debug window on until you actually start collecting data from external participants and are no longer editing your project; you should keep it on even for you last test-runs. The debugger can provide you with helpful error and log messages which will save you a valuable amount of time and efforts in troubleshooting your experiments.

Once you are ready to collect data and are no longer editing your project, turn the debugger off by using the command DebugOff().

Tabs

  • Info: Displays information about the current trial (label, index, etc.)
  • Sequence: Lists all trials, and allows you to skip to any particular trial using the Reach button
  • Tables: Lists all tables. Double-click a table to open a preview tab
  • Errors: Presents any error messages. The error messages will help you identify what to fix in your script
  • Logs: Reports whenever a command is executed on an element, or whenever a resource is successfully preloaded. It also includes a Next command button in case the current command crashed, and a Next trial button in case the current trial crashed