Pilot mode
Piloting a PsychoPy experiment can mean one of three things.
Locally you can switch between Pilot and Run mode by clicking on the toggle between the two words.
In pilot mode the two run buttons are orange instead of green.
Pressing the main run button will run the experiment in a window (rather than full screen) and include a and orange border and the warning PILOTING: Switch to run mode before testing.
The parameters for Pilot mode can be edited from File / Preferences
If instead of piloting locally, you press the JS run button, the experiment will be run locally in your default browser (in full screen). To do this, a copy of the PsychoJS libraries are downloaded to a lib folder in your experiment folder.
If you switch to Run mode and press the JS then you will instead be sent to the appropriate web link. However, if you haven’t already synced your experiment with Pavlovia then you will first be prompted to create a project and will the get a 404 not found error.
Before you can run an experiment online, you must visit the project page – the link appears in the Stdout and Pavlovia tabs of the Runner every time you sync.
Online, experiments can be in one of three modes: Inactive, Piloting and Running. In this screenshot, the software platform is unknown and the platform version is 0. The experiment will not run online. To pilot the experiment online, switch the mode to Piloting by clicking on the Piloting message.
The experiment now has platform PSYCHOJS and version 2024.2.4 (or whatever version you are using). To pilot online, you press the Pilot button in the top right.
A pilot token will be generated so the experiment can run, e.g.
https://run.pavlovia.org/test-suite/test-simple/?__pilotToken=3c59dc048e8850243be8079a5c74d079&__oauthToken=6204c1a913ae8582005a283175a1aa23cade068d6403dce894a26bb8b2bf5641
When you pilot an experiment, data is downloaded to your computer. You should therefore keep the results format set to CSV so you get spreadsheets rather than JSON data files – though you will get a JSON download after every embedded Pavlovia Survey and a sound file after each microphone component.
If the experiment is in piloting mode online and you try to run it online from Builder, you will now get a different error message.
If you switch the experiment to running mode, then it will now run if you have a licence or have assigned credits to the study. If neither of these are true, the error message will be:
If you are using credits, don’t forget to turn off save incomplete results before you add any.
Note that the lib folder from piloting in the local browser does not get uploaded. If you view code, your Gitlab folder should look something like this.
