It took us a while, but we are very happy to finally announce a new release, Brian 2.5 🎉. This release comes with a large number of bug fixes, various small improvements to the C++ code generation process, new examples and improved documentation, as well as a more powerful “generator syntax” for synapse generation. In particular, it is now possible to generate a fixed number of synapses randomly – either for each pre-synaptic or for each post-synaptic cell. We have also updated our build and testing infrastructure, and now provide binary pip-installable packages for all platforms, including the fancy new Apple hardware. Please let us know if you run into any issues!

Bug hunt episode 2: a strange file appears

Marcel Stimberg

2021-09-24

This is the second article in the “bug hunt” series. In these articles, I go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it.

Today’s bug is about a strangely named file that seemingly appears out of nowhere when running Brian simulations. The final fix for the bug will turn out to be a single character change in the Brian code base 😀!

Bug hunt episode 1: Broken LaTeX output for equations

Marcel Stimberg

2021-05-05

This article starts a new series of blog posts about “bug hunts”. In these articles, I will go through a recent bug in Brian (or one of its dependencies) and describe all the steps I used to find the source of the bug and how I fixed it. I will try to not only focus on the Brian-side of things, but also show some general tools like git bisect or “monkey patching” that can be helpful to find the source of these nasty critters (no actual bugs were harmed during the making of this blog post).

Let’s start! Today’s bug will be about equations, and more specifically about their LaTeX representation. As most of you probably know, Brian can represent equations, quantities, etc. in LaTeX. This representation can then either be included in a LaTeX document or directly rendered for example as the output in jupyter notebooks.

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Live session on Brian development

Brian team

2021-02-08

Marcel Stimberg will talk about Brian’s development process in a live developer session on Thursday, Feb 11 2021, 17:00 UTC (check local time). For more information and the link to the Zoom session see the announcement.

Getting the timing right (scheduling 2)

Brian team

2020-10-08

This article is written as a Jupyter notebook which you can execute and modify interactively. You can either download it via the “Source” link on the top right, or run it directly in the browser on the mybinder infrastructure:

For more information, see our general Notes on Notebooks.

Quickstart

To run the code below:

Click on the cell to select it.
Press SHIFT+ENTER on your keyboard or press the play button () in the toolbar above

Feel free to create new cells using the plus button (), or pressing SHIFT+ENTER while this cell is selected.

“Scheduling”: mechanism to determine the order of operations during a simulation

In this video we will look at its importance for:

propagating synaptic activity

You can also watch the screencast video on Youtube.

New release: Brian 2.4

Brian team

2020-09-07

In these very particular times, we are nevertheless happy to announce a new release, Brian 2.4. This release fixes a large number of bugs and includes a number of small improvements. As announced with the previous release, Brian 2.4 is the first release that no longer supports Python 2. For a full list of changes, see the release notes. We recommend all users of Brian 2 to update.

Getting the timing right (scheduling 1)

Brian team

2020-09-04

This article is written as a Jupyter notebook which you can execute and modify interactively. You can either download it via the “Source” link on the top right, or run it directly in the browser on the mybinder infrastructure:

For more information, see our general Notes on Notebooks.

Quickstart

To run the code below:

Click on the cell to select it.
Press SHIFT+ENTER on your keyboard or press the play button () in the toolbar above

Feel free to create new cells using the plus button (), or pressing SHIFT+ENTER while this cell is selected.

“Scheduling”: mechanism to determine the order of operations during a simulation

In this notebook we will look at its importance for:

recording values with a StateMonitor

You can also watch the screencast video on Youtube.

New Brian community forum

Brian team

2020-08-24

Ask questions, chat and learn with other Brian users, show off what you’ve done, suggest new features, … We will try out a brand new forum for support questions and general discussion, replacing our previous forums on Google Groups. The new forum builds on the Discourse platform which gives us exciting new features such as giving credit to users for answering questions.

Brian online tutorial

Brian team

2020-08-06

We will experiment with running a Brian tutorial online. The first tutorial of this kind will take place on Friday, August 7th 2020 from 2pm-6pm BST (UTC+1, see here for other timezones). Free (but mandatory) registration here. We will run the tutorial as a Zoom meeting – registering with the link will give you the URL (please don’t share so we can avoid zoombombing). We will record the meeting and if everything goes reasonably well, we will upload the videos later.