Last Updated on January 24, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Robert Oostenveld is Associate Principal Investigator at the Donders Institute for Brain, Cognition and Behaviour, Nijmegen, Niederlande:
https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=eEbaa0UAAAAJ&hl=de
We only saw today Robert Oostenvelds very differentiated answer to our question about the OpenBCI Cyton, which reprint here from his personal site:
Something went wrong, we did not receive an e-mail which informed us about Robert Oostenvelds answer, which is highly interesting for us personally. Our question was:
Peter Gamma:
“Hi Robert,
thanks for your great reviews on your personal, hobby and professional blog, which are very interesting to us personally. You previously mentioned that the Unicorn works much better than the OpenBCI Cyton. Are there any features which did not work good with the OpenBCI Cyton? And did you have any problems using the OpenBCI Cyton?”
Robert Oostenvelds answered on January 17, 2023 at 10:10 am
Hi Peter,
I have not used the OpenBCI Cyton for a while, but specific problems which I recall and saw others struggle with include the following: The connectivity with the dongle is not so stable, sometimes requiring multiple attempts to connect, resetting the board, replugging the dongle, etc. The Cyton exposes a lot of details of the Ti-ASD1299 chip, which makes it difficult to make the right choice in configuring the board and hence increases the risk of a suboptimal or incorrect configuration. The technical documentation and design of the PCB has some errors (on SRB1/SRB2), which don’t matter if you only care about getting “some signal” but which cause polarity to be flipped. The wifi shield only works sporadically and hence cannot be relied on. The software ecosystem is rather spotty, there are multiple sub-projects that are not functional and seem abandoned.
This is not to say that I am complaining about the Cyton: it is not expensive, it is open hardware and source and it is possible with all open information to debug everything. However, I had expected or hoped that by now (after 9 years of its initial release) there would have been a version 2 of the Cyton board with improved usability. For me it felt that I was spending more time trying to debug than doing EEG, hence I moved on to other systems: the Ganglion (with lower SNR, fewer channels but more usable) and the Unicorn (overall cheaper, more complete as a set, and easier to use).
best, Robert