EEG data acquisition system with 32 channels based on 4 Raspberry Pi’s & 4 PiEEG hats?

Last Updated on February 29, 2024 by pg@petergamma.org

32 channel devices are still difficult to find, and have some issues. MbrainTrain offers those, but they are expensive, and have only Bluetooth transmission. And there seems to be not much hope in near future that devices will come onto the market with 32 channels which are based on InfluxDB according to our study:

Why are there only scientific papers with ECG & InfluxDB, but hardly any with EEG & Influx DB?

Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org has aleady made some suggestions how this could be solved in the Raspberry Pi forum :

https://forums.raspberrypi.com/viewtopic.php?p=2178452#p2178452

Researchers from the University of Indonesia had already some years ago built a 8 – 32 Channel device from the ADS1299 Performance Demonstration Kit from Texas instruments. They first used a Raspberry Pi and a 8 channel board:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/325635924_Design_of_EEG_Data_Acquisition_System_based_on_Raspberry_Pi_3_for_Acute_Ischemic_Stroke_Identification

Then they used a PYNQ. PYNQ is an open-source project from AMD that makes it easier to use Adaptive Computing platform:

http://www.pynq.io/

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/332321992_Development_of_electroencephalography_EEG_data_acquisition_system_based_on_FPGA_PYNQ

Then they have built a 32 channel EEG device with daisy chain algorithms:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/337896178_EEG_data_acquisition_system_32_channels_based_on_Raspberry_Pi_with_relative_power_ratio_and_brain_symmetry_index_features

I is a project which was published on researchgate.net by Indonesion researchers in the year 2019. Peter Gamma is physiologist and not a soft- and hardware developer. Therefore the project to build a 32 channel device from four PiEEG is a big challenge for him, but still the answer if this could be solved with PiEEGs in a professional way is very interesting for Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org. But an electonics engineer would certainly much easier find an answer to this than a physiologist like him. So Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org describes this project here as an issue which could be investigated by an electronics engineer which is looking for a project. Especially the question is open, if InfluxDB would make this project easier or not.

For this project to be successful all channels of the 4 PiEEG’s need to be sampled at exactly the same time. PiEEG is the much more simpler architecture than OpenBCI Cyton or the ADS1299 Performance Demonstration Kit from Texas instruments. And the architecture of PiEEG should in principle allow the sampling of all 32 channels at exactly the same time. And we suppose that InfluxDB is not required urgently, and a 32 channel device without InfluxDB would eventually be much simpler.