• New@20250711: Revision of BOM.xlsx to update the part information of the header pin attached to the PCB board.
• New@20240802: Instruction to build WRAQ hardware now available here

WRAQ is an acronym that stands for Wheel Running Activity acQuisition, a microcontroller driven open-source stand-alone solution to monitor wheel running activity of mice at the home cage¹. This repository includes the detailed guide for installing the integrated developmental environment (IDE) and dependent libraries for building and setting up WRAQ systems – WRAQ and WRAQ-Wifi. WRAQ and WRAQ-WiFi are based on Adafruit Adalogger and DFRobot FireBeetle ESP32 connected to the 4- and 8-bit binary counters receiving the signal from reed switch attached to the 5-inch flying saucer (Ware Manufacturing Inc., Phoenix, AZ), respectively. Please refer to the instruction to build WRAQ hardware available here.

Mouse activity data is stored as comma-separated values (csv) format. Basic analysis is done using ActogramJ² which is a software package based on ImageJ for the analysis and visualization of chronobiological data. Python is used to parse WRAQ output data (csv) to ActogramJ compatible input data file. The workflow and the python scripts used for the data analysis of the voluntary activity of mouse is also provided here.

[1] Zhu M, Kasaragod DK, Kikutani K, Taguchi K, Aizawa H. A novel microcontroller-based system for the wheel-running activity in mice. eNeuro. 2021 Sep 3:ENEURO.0260-21.2021. doi: 10.1523/ENEURO.0260-21.2021. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 34479979.

[2] Schmid B, Helfrich-Förster C, Yoshii T: A new ImageJ plugin “ActogramJ” for chronobiological analyses. J Biol Rhythms 2011, 26:464-467.