Last Updated on August 18, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
Can products from www.OpenBCI.com be used for research applications? This paper shows that it is possible:
But has www.OpenBCI.com a support which is helpful for reserachers who are interested in developing new devices, or do they only want to sell what is in the www.OpenBCI.com store, until www.OpenBCI.com is dead? For the MRIS it quiet frustrating who is interested in such devices to use those for research. As the example of Raspberry Pi shows, the more affordable the devices are, the bigger the community of users is, and the more interesting these devices are for those. But does www.OpenBCI.com care to optimise costs and resolve issues? If not, we do it for those. We experienced that the community of users for multi-sensor devices is quiet small, and that only view are interested in those on the long-term.
We also experienced that multi-sensor devices which are based on the Texas Instruments ADS1299 EEG chip are hardly developed further. Is this because new multi-sensor devices are built with InfluxDB? We have published here an example how to start building a device which is based on InfluxDB. Is this not the future of low-cost high-quality physiological multi sensor devices?
In this example instruction, electronic components need to be soldered together and code example have to be connected together. But if pioneers in this discipline have already shown the proof of the functioning of these devices, are they not much more interesting than devices which based on the Texas Instruments ADS1299? What is a bit of soldering and coding compared to a search of several years to find a device which fits for our needs, and never finding it?
What we miss from these InfluxDB instructions is that they are not tested with so much passion on a regular basis as Rob ter Host tests smartwatches. And we do not know if those instructions really work. But we think it is the most interersting pathway for us personally to choose as a future direction. Another challenge are the code examples how to read and write sensor data to InfluxDB. Also here it is difficult for beginners, but we will observe with big interest how these projects are developed further.