Warning Concerning the OpenBCI WIFI Shield & MQTT

Last Updated on September 25, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

We made several posts on this blog about the OpenBCI WIFI shield. The OpenBCI Wifi shield has issues:

Issues of the OpenBCI WIFI Shield with MQTT Support

• Since two ears, OpenBCI anounces, that the OpenBCI WIFI shield «may come back or may not come back» (William Croft from OpenBCI), and Shirley from OpenBCI anounced, that the new WIFI shield is postponed but not given up:

https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/2699/wifi-shield-availablity-in-store-need-higher-sample-rate#latest

According to the information we have got, the OpenBCI WIFI shield was developed by Computer Engineer A. J. Keller, which is now CEO of Neurosity:

https://neurosity.co/about

A. J. Keller warned on the product page of the OpenBCI Wifi Shield, that the device can be tricky and difficult in certain modes:

https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/2325/udpx3-not-working

Neurosity developed new devices, one of them is the Neurosity with a high-quality WIFI stream:

Neurosity Crown Uses Wifi & Garanties No Packet Loss

• Is Neurosity Crown based on OpenBCI Cyton and a successor of the OpenBCI WIFI shield which was made issue free by a computer engineer AJ Keller and Neurosity Co-founder Alex Castillo, who leads everything software?

• We could not find any confirmation buy users that OpenBCI WIFI can be made reliable trough the instructions published by OpenBCI. We did not make an intense search about this topic. We simply could not find any striking examples in which the OpenBCI WIFI shield is used.

• We could not find any users who use the OpenBCI WIFI shield and confirms, that it is reliable:

• The OpenBCI WIFI shield is available from Aliexpress:

https://www.aliexpress.com/item/32906287500.html?spm=a2g0o.productlist.0.0.3ba76c6a7JnkVB&algo_pvid=2c3aa774-a37b-4138-b746-eb9e97350232&algo_exp_id=2c3aa774-a37b-4138-b746-eb9e97350232-1&pdp_ext_f=%7B%22sku_id%22%3A%2212000020987248519%22%7D&pdp_npi=2%40dis%21USD%21379.0%21379.0%21%21%2144.42%21%21%4021031a5516639222848294099ee882%2112000020987248519%21sea&curPageLogUid=ysoRFKQYLfQR

• The OpenBCI MQTT interface is based on the OpenBCI WIFI shield

• But we could not find users who use it and confirm that it works

• There is a paper which uses an OpenBCI Cyton Board and MQTT. But it uses an ODROID XU4 single board computer to run MQTT on it and uses only one channel.

http://docsdrive.com/pdfs/medwelljournals/jeasci/2020/1377-1384.pdf

• Who buys a 8 channel OpenBCI Cyton board for a paper to use only one channel for MQTT? A single TGAM device would have been sufficient.

• The information about the OpenBCI WIFI shield and MQTT which is available is confusing.

Several posts on this site where made under the assumption, that there is a new OpenBCI WIFI available sooner or later from OpenBCI which is issue free. And there where several posts made on this blog under the assumtion that the OpenBCI WIFI shield can be used for MQTT. OpenBCI announces the new WIFI shield since two years, but nothing happened. And we don t know, if it ever will happen.