Summary of the Connectivity of OpenBCI

Last Updated on October 9, 2022 by pg@petergamma.org

Selection of options:

1.OpenBCI can be connected over cable and USB

which is not recommended.

2. OpenBCI can be connected over the Cyton Bluetooth dongle

• to the OpenBCI GUI

• OpenBCI GUI supports LSL

3. OpenBCI can be connected over the OpenBCI WIFI shield the OpenBCI GUI

• the OpenBCI WIFI shield is currently not available from OpenBCI

• the OpenBCI wifi shield has issues: cyclic noise spiking and paket loss

• to fix it, it needs a hardware change, which is documented

• the OpenBCI WIFI shield is available from Aliexpress and Ebay

• there is a power-improved version of the OpenBCI WIFI shield available from Aliexpress, which could eventually be an issue-free version of the WIFI shield, but this needs to be tested

• the OpenBCI WIFI shield supports MQTT

• we do not know of any users who use or confirm to use OpenBCI with MQTT

• LSL over the OpenBCI WIFI shield has issues

• There is an OpenBCI WiFi Shield API available to connect to.

Neurocity EEG devices from OpenBCI WIFI shield developer AJ Keller have 8 channels of EEG streamed over WIFI, and OpenBCI Galea has 16 channels physiological sensor streaming over WIFI. We suppose that the EEG stream from these devices are derived from the OpenBCI WFI shield and is reliable. Therefore, we suppose that it is possible to make the OpenBCI WIFI shield free from packet loss and cyclic noise spiking as well, and that it is possible to attach the device to the software of our choice. And whe are convinced, that it is worth to test this.