Last Updated on September 22, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org
- OpenBCI has a supported forum, many device do not have this options, the support is high quality
- But in the support forum, sometimes answers where given where we suspect that the goal of the answers is to keep the costs for EEG devics high, and to eliminate competitor products, or to make them impossible.
- The costs for Cyton boards from OpenBCI are around 4x the costs as the costs from OpenBCI Cyton boards bought from Aliexpress in China, the costs for the OpenBCI Cyton board sold in in the US OpenBCI store are high.
- Also other products in the US OpenBCI store are high cost products, and are partly older devices. For instance the pulse sensor in the US OpenBCI store is an old device which is not replaced by newer devices which eventually have a higher quality.
- The OpenBCI WIFI shield needs to be repaired, but it is not repared by OpenBCI USA since two years. It is anounced that this will be done, but it was not done to this date. People are looking for the Gerber files for the Wifi Shield from OpenBCI and ask questions in the OpenBCI forum, eventually to repair the WIFI shield. But OpenBCI does not publish the Gerber files for the WIFI shield. For the Cyton board, these files are published. Why are they not also published for the WIFI shields with issues? Other companies could take it over and repair it? Is this to eliminate competitors? We are asking the question, is this an open source community or not?
- When we where publishing somewhere in the web info about competitor products to OpenBCI, we revieved e-mails from OpenBCI to stop this. Everybody is free to publish in the web what he wants, the web is not a property of OpenBCI.
- Let us decide yourselves, if OpenBCI is the most low cost high quality device on the market or not.