The future of OpenBCI?

Last Updated on August 6, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org

  • OpenBCI has the potential to be the most low-cost high qualiy modules which are available, which eventually means, that they can also have the largest community of users worldwide.
  • The Muse headband has lost many users since the Muse SDK is not available anymore. Affordable OpenBCI modules can be a great alternative.
  • Resolving the issues Robert Oostenveld mentioned would make those modules more usable for research and developement.
  • Since the Chinese developers are very skilled, will they offer a special variant of OpenBCI which is suitable for InfluxDB? According to William Croft from OpenBCI, a hardware change would be necessary to get all the parameters in InfluxDB. With the current modules, parameters like phase, and coherence are missing. It is highly desirable that modified modules suitable for InfluxDB come on the market. For InfluxDB, single modules might be more suitable. But since software support for OpenBCI is very good, with OpenBCI GUI; LSL, OSC, Python and Brainflow, an aditional variant which is suitable for InfluxDB would be very helpful, to make out of it it a more contemporary open source product. The Chinese manufacturer does not publish their Gerber files. But if these manufacturers offer all desirable variants of OpenBCI at a fair prize, do we urgently need an open source product?
  • But the question arrises if such a big update is worth doing, for instance an additional chip with a cache. These are certainly questions for electonic engineers to answer.
  • The question arrises also, if we can do without phase and coherence for our projects for the time being.
  • And for future new modules based on InluxDB, eventually a new architecture as the one shown here might be simpler:
  • This is also a project for electonic engineers to develop it.
  • But the knowledge and the potential is here to produce such modules and offer those for a fair prize, especially in China.