What is SMILE?¶
SMILE is the State Machine Interface Library for Experiments. The goal when developing SMILE was to create an east-to-use experiment building library that allows for millisecond-accurate timing. SMILE was written so that the end user doesn’t have to worry about the intricacies of timing, event handling, or logging data.
Inspired by the concept of a state machine, SMILE works by storing the current status of releveant input events, then initiating an action depending on a predetermined set of rules. With the support of the versatile Python programming language and Kivy, a module create for video game development, SMILE is powerful and flexible while still being simple to use.
What does a SMILE experiment look like?¶
Below is hello.py, an example of what the simplest SMILE experiment looks like:
from smile.common import *
exp = Experiment()
Label(text="Hello, World!", duration=5)
exp.run()
In order to run this experiment from a computer that has SMILE installed, you would use your favorite OS’s command prompt and run the following line:
>> python hello.py -s SubjectID
This program creates a full-screen window with a black background and the words Hello, World! in white text in the center–just like that, we are SMILEing!
Now let us go through our SMILE experiment line by line and see what each of them does.
First is the line exp = Experiment(). This line is the initialization line for SMILE. This tells SMILE that it should prepare to see states being declared.
Second is the line Label(text=”Hello, World!”, duration=5). Label is a SMILE visual state that displays text onto the screen. Certain SMILE states take a duration, and we are setting this state’s duration to 5. This means the state will remain active on the screen for 5 seconds.
Third is the line exp.run(). This line signals to SMILE that you have finished building your experiment and that it is ready to run. SMILE will then run your experiment from start to finish and exit the experiment window when it has finished.
Whats Next?¶
To help you get ready to SMILE, the first section of this documentation is the SMILE installation and the installation of its dependencies. After that is a section that delves deeper into SMILE and how to write more complicated experiments.
