Generating an example NWB file#
In case you don’t have any NWB files handy, or perhaps you’ve never worked with NWB files before, you can generate an example file by running:
nwb2bids tutorial ephys file
import nwb2bids
tutorial_file = nwb2bids.testing.generate_ephys_tutorial(mode="file")
This created an NWB file with contents typical of an extracellular electrophysiology experiment in your home
directory for nwb2bids: ~/nwb2bids_tutorials/ecephys_tutorial_file/ecephys.nwb.
NWB files like these contain a lot of metadata about the probes and electrode structure, which will be useful later when we compare the source file to the sidecar tables found in BIDS. You can explore these file contents through neurosift.app by following this link.
Tip
The link above actually points to a similar file published on the DANDI Archive, which should be identical to what was created on your system. You can explore and visualize your local file contents and structure in many other ways, such as the NWB GUIDE, HDFView, or the PyNWB library.
If you ever upload your own NWB files to DANDI or EMBER, you too can share Neurosift links with your collaborators!
Other modalities#
You can also generate example NWB files for other modalities, such as icephys!
nwb2bids tutorial ephys file --modality icephys
import nwb2bids
tutorial_file = nwb2bids.testing.generate_ephys_tutorial(mode="file", modality="icephys")