Two open source designs for a low‐cost operant chamber using Raspberry Pi

After almost a century of use and development, operant chambers remain a significant financial investment for scientists. Small powerful single‐board computers such as the Raspberry Pi™ offer researchers a low‐cost alternative to expensive operant chambers. In this paper, we describe two new operant chambers, one using nose‐poke ports as operanda and another using a touchscreen. To validate the chamber designs, rats learned to perform both visual discrimination and delayed alternation tasks in each chamber. Designs and codes are open source and serve as a starting point for researchers to develop behavioral experiments or educational demonstrations.