Last Updated on August 20, 2025 by pg@petergamma.org
If we look at the sales rates of these modules, we observed that these modules are pulled from the market for instance in the eBay offers and are then relaunched, for instance by another shop.
We also observed that these shops reacted on criticisms. For instance they offered OpenBCI modules with 16 channels & WIFI incl. tests that they are working. But we also observed that these only seemed to be demo modules, which disappeared again.
We do not know of anyone who says that they use OpenBCI modules sold on eBay and Aliexpress. Some posters in the www.openbci.com forum tried to get those to work, but failed.
We suppose that the modules sold from www.openbci.com are tested, but not those sold on eBay and Aliexpress.
But the Chinese sellers seem to have the potential to offer tested modules, if someone is interested.
Peter Gamma from www.petergamma.org
is interested, but does not want to negotiate with the Chinese sellers. We already asked Professor Thomas Knöpfel, Chair Professor, Department of Physics, Director of JC STEM laboratory of Neuronal Circuit Dynamics in Hong Kong Baptist University to care about the problem. But there was no reaction.
For sellers like us in Switzerland, OpenBCI modules from China would be more interesting thant OpenBCI modules from the U.S. They are currently cheaper and offer optimized import costs.
These things can eventually change. Similar to what happened with the Orange Pi single board computers and Raspberry Pi s. For a long period of time, nobody used Orange Pi s. They where not developed well enough. But during the chip crisis, the Orange Pi 5 made a huge jump, and is now more interesting for us personally than the Raspberry Pi 5.
And similar things can happen with the OpenBCI modules from China. Eventually Chinese OpenBCI developers will care for this problem sooner or later?
A major issue of products from www.openbci.com is still that they do not offer a Wifi shield. This shield is available from Chinese sellers, but no one seems to use it.
And also here we invite Chinese developers to take care of the problem. The Chinese developers of OpenBCI seem to have the capacity to solve all this problem.
But there seems not yet to be any sellers from China who are interested in selling higher quality tested modules. This may change in the future.