Part I can be found here.
Are OpenBCI products which are sold on eBay & Aliexpress cheap inferior goods?
Stellarpower tested an OpenBCI product with 16 channels and WIFI which had issues:
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/3502/cyton-wifi-packet-loss-noise-issues
- Which he bought not from www.OpenBCI.com. Hardware issues with the WIFI shield can be repaired:
jenelson had issues with modules which are not bough from www.OpenBCI.com either:
- He had issues with the communication with the Cyton board and the WIFI shield:
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/comment/19681#Comment_19681
Stellarpower did not have the issues jenelson had. So it is not a failure in the construction, but these are products of low quality. jenelson writes he has decades of professional experience solving analog problems like ground loops, noise, EMC, etc. But neigher StellarPower nor jenelson did get their OpenBCI products which are not bought from www.OpenBCI.com to work.
If whe look at all of this, these boards sold on Aliexpress & eBay should in principle work. Stellarpower had issues with cyclic noise spiking and packet loss. These issues can be solved by a hardware change. jenelson had issues with the communication between the Cyton board and the WIFI shield. Stellarpower did not have these issues. This means that if we would combine the products these two testers tested, we whould have a working setup.
But if you look at these examples, it can be very time consuming to get those working. Don’t forget that it is often not worth sending back OpenBCI products to China, since shipping costs to China are high, if these products have issues. We did not find anywhere OpenBCI products on eBay and Aliexpress which have high ratings in costumers satisfaction. Only view are sold from each product.
We did not find at other places in the web or on YouTube users who reported to use OpenBCI products which they bought on Aliexpress and eBay. These OpenBCI products are available there since years. And would not have someone have given a positive feedback or published a positive example somewhere if they would have managed to get those to work? We did not find such an example to this date. We where looking for an affordable solution since years:
Which we haven’t found to this date. And does this not say that it is something wrong with our approach? As an alternative we suggest to go this path:
Together with this path:
We are looking for low-cost high-quality physiological sensor devices since years. But we haven’t found it yet. Would not someone else already have found it and published it? Someone else than on YouTube and WorldPress, in a high-quality journal? But we have not found these publications to this date. There are tons of sellers and testers out there who are much more experienced than we are. But would they not have found what we are looking for since years before us? But they did not find what we are looking for either. Would we not know about this?
As a conclusion: Only trust in publications with this Conflict of Interest Statement:
«The authors declares that this site was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.»
Which are published in a high-quality journal. And don’t trust in offers on YouTube and in the web, which do not have these conflict of interest statements.
Farmer’s cleverness (part II) is: offer cheap inferior goods to smart testers, and if they debug those for you, you can use those and sell those as well. And if not, you where at least able to sell cheap inferior goods (what you knew from the beginning?) to someone smart for a while, until he found out about it. And the smart did all the work for you, and you could make money out of him for a wile.
- Are OpenBCI products which are sold on eBay & Aliexpress cheap inferior goods?
- We do not have any evidence that OpenBCI products made in China are better or worse than products sold from www.OpenBCI.com.
- As fas a warranty is concerned, some OpenBCI products are even better. They offer a lifetime warranty.