General Laboratory Interface for Design, Experimentation, and Recording

Documentation Coming Soon...

Prerequisites

1. uv — manages the virtual environment and Python for you
   • Windows: winget install astral-sh.uv
   • macOS/Linux: curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh
2. FFmpeg (for video recording)
   • Windows: winget install "FFmpeg (Essentials Build)"
   • macOS: brew install ffmpeg
   • Linux/Raspberry Pi: sudo apt install ffmpeg

GLIDER requires Python 3.11–3.13 (3.14+ is not supported). uv installs a compatible Python automatically — no separate Python install needed.

Getting Started

Windows / macOS / Linux

git clone https://github.com/LaingLab/glider.git
cd glider
uv venv
uv sync --extra pc
uv run glider

Raspberry Pi

PyQt6 comes from apt on the Pi (it is intentionally not a core dependency), so the venv must be created with access to system packages:

sudo apt install python3-pyqt6
git clone https://github.com/LaingLab/glider.git
cd glider
uv venv --system-site-packages
uv sync --extra rpi --extra i2c
uv run glider

Optional Extras

Add any of these to the sync command with additional --extra flags, e.g. uv sync --extra pc --extra vision:

Extra	What it adds
pc	PyQt6 + audio — the standard desktop install
rpi	Raspberry Pi GPIO (gpiozero, lgpio)
vision	YOLO tracking (ultralytics)
audio	Audio recording/playback
i2c	I2C devices (ADS1x15, smbus2) — Linux/Pi only at runtime
behavior	Behavior analysis (UMAP, HDBSCAN, scikit-learn, LightGBM)
dev	Test/lint tooling plus the full pc+vision+i2c+behavior stack

Development

uv sync --extra dev

# Tests (Qt needs a virtual display when headless)
QT_QPA_PLATFORM=offscreen uv run pytest tests/

# Lint & format
uv run ruff check .
uv run black .