1. Introduction

Tucker-Davis Technologies (TDT) is a company supplying signal processing systems. The signals recorded by their System 3 are stored in a database called TTank and can be read out later. TDT provides application programming interfaces (APIs) for TTank access through ActiveX DLLs and, in any development environment where ActiveX can be incorporated, users can make TTank applications easily.

For example, in MATLAB, you can create a TTank object with the following command. (You need to install OpenDeveloper package before typing the command.)

TTX = actxcontrol('TTank.X');

Then you can call any API functions listed in the OpenDeveloper reference manual with the object. (Some code examples are installed with the OpenDeveloper package in C:\TDT\OpenEx\Examples\TTankX_Example\Matlab) If you do not have a TDT system and just want to read TTank, then you can try out TDT NeuroShare Kit. I have not tested it , but I guess it works in a similar way.

However, sometimes it is not convenient to use particular DLLs to access data, since it means that you are bound to the MS Windows platform and cannot read your data without the TDT software package. Considering that you never know how long you will be able to get necessary technical support from the vendor, it is probably not a bad idea to learn how to read the binary format of the TTank directly.

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