Last Updated on January 24, 2023 by pg@petergamma.org
We don t know. https://openbci.com/ does not sell a WIFI shield since about two years. The OpenBCI WIFI shield had issues with packet loss and cyclic noise spiking, and needs to be repaired. There can be found instructions in the web, how to do this. It requires advanced coding skills and basic soldering skills.
We do not have any information about if or when it will come back from https://openbci.com/.
Shirley Zhang from OpenBCI who is responsible for the WIFI shield informed about it, that it is postponed since she has no time for it, bu not given up. But can we trust her?
Different other sellers offer OpenBCI WIFI shields in different stores. Are these issue-free? We do not know. Some offer “original OpenBCI WIFI shields”, some offer “updated WIFI shields”, some offer “power improved and denoised WIFI shields”. But we did not test these, and we can not give a recommendation which one and where to buy an OpenBCI WIFI shield.
Since several years, we reviewed OpenBCI hardware components and software, which are available and where. But we did not test these components ourselves and do not use those ourselves.
Be observed that different stores declare how much OpenBCI components are available, and how many components they have sold. In these stores, we saw only small selling rates for OpenBCI.
Now and then, we observed, that one or two new OpenBCI components in different stores came on the market. These where modified, fused, adapted, new, etc. components from OpenBCI which we have seen never before and nowhere else. Are these student projects, which they developed for themselves, and then sell those? If so, these are not open source projects, since we did nowhere find a documentation for these OpenBCI projects which would make out of those open source projects.
During the time we reviewed, we could not see a clear trend in these observations. New OpenBCI products appeared only very rarely. The selling rates seem to be low. We observed in some individual cases, that prizes where lowered for these components by a few dollars.
So where can we buy an issue-free WIFI shield now? We don t know. We suggest to buy a WIFI shield from a store which sells WIFI shields, test it, and repair it, if necessary.
We own two OpenBCI WIFI shields, but we never tested those. We suppose that they have issues. We will keep those, and will eventually try to repair those, and will not sell those.
According to the information whe have, it is the best way to do as much as we can be ourselves. The OpenBCI WIFI shield Gerber files are handled out by https://openbci.com/ on request, as far as we know. OpenBCI is an open source soft- and hardware platform.
We suggest also to backup any documentation which is available and published in the web as an open source project to be on the safe side. We observed in resent years that for instance the Interaxon forum, the Polar forum, the BITalino forum and other forums disappeared. To be on the save site, we suggest to backup these components yourself.