DMDX Help.


Remote Monitoring
   
    DMDX allows you to monitor it's progress on a remote machine connected to it with a network interface with the Monitor.exe program found in the Program Files / DMDX folder. Although the TCP/IP protocol is used conceivably allowing the remote machine to be anywhere on the internet it is expected to be found locally as the network code does not elegantly deal with lost connections (it's going to spend a long damn time waiting till the connection times out).  If you do intend to test on machines beyond the local network see the remote testing section.  If you intend to communicate with another machine (say an eye tracker) using the TCP/IP protocol see the tcpip input device in the input device section.
   
    Information on setting up the remote machine and the Monitor program can be found in TimeDX's help file.

    If you have setup a remote monitoring machine running the Monitor program DMDX (currently) will connect to it when it is first run -- not at the beginning of a particular run of an item file. If you have not got Monitor running when you start DMDX you will be given the opportunity to retry the connection (assuming you go and start Monitor on the remote machine). If you cancel the connection DMDX will not attempt to re-establish a connection until DMDX is run again; DMDX will function normally unless you were using the remote Monitor for Naming Task Negation (in which case it will use the local machine's display and keyboard).

    Using the remote monitor changes the way several things work in DMDX:

Naming Task Negation	All naming task negation prompts will be sent to the remote machine and not presented on the local machine at all.
Bells	For version 1.2.00 and onwards. When using the remote monitor all bells that DMDX would normally sound are sent to the remote monitor as well as to the local machine (the local bell won't sound however if acoustic stimuli have been used).
Experimenter Signaling	Both Acoustic and Visual experimenter signaling is sent to the remote machine as well.

    These days you can actually use Monitor to directly receive strings from your item file as it executes rather than set up remote monitoring with TmeDX.  What you do is run monitor on another machine and use DMDX's <id tcpip> device parameter and <send> in items to send strings to Monitor saving you (or you RA) from having to parse DMDX's spew as it's running and instead send specific plain text commands instead.  This can in fact be combined with Remote Testing where as long as you set things up so that only one subject can run your remote testing package at once (the second instance running wouldn't be able to connect to Monitor and would present the subject with a dialog to retry the connection) you can have your remote testing send you messages, I just tested it from California to Tucson so it's probably going to work everywhere assuming you have a port that's open on the machine running Monitor (not always the case, talk to your network techs).




DMDX Index.