Are OpenBCI and InfluxDB not architectures which are redundant?

Last Updated on January 24, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

Home Assistant has many sensor examples which show how to connect those to Home Assistant. Home Assistant is a multi-sensor platform. Does it also work with physiological sensors? We don t know. If we start with multi-sensor EEG devices, the advantage of OpenBCI is the availability of the OpenBCI GUI, which is easy to start with.

But as soon as we want to connect sensors to InfluxDB, we will only choose sensor modules which we want to use on the long term. Who wants to write new code for every new Apple watch which is on the market to connect it to InfluxDB?

Before we get start with InfluxDB, we have to carefully evaluate, which modules we want to connect to InfluxDB and use on the long term, and how many channels and sensors we need. If we connect OpenBCI modules to InfluxDB, we will depend on the long term on OpenBCI modules, and will not replace those, soon.

OpenBCI multi-sensor devices and InfluxDB are architectures which are redundant. Do we need both architectures at the same time? The only advantage we know is OpenBCI GUI. But we suppose, similar software is also available in Python. Eventually it is better to ask an engineer which architecture is best to start with with InfluxDB.

It is also worth to study the literature and read good papers about this topic. Engineers can answer these questions much better than we, and hopefully also offer better solutions and write better papers than physiologists who write papers about engineering topics.