This newsletter will be short and sweet! Given that November is the holiday shopping month, we have an awesome discount for those of you who want to stock up on OpenBCI gear before the end of the year! We also want to share a few recent community projects from around the web that we really enjoyed.

In this month’s newsletter:

Treat yourself to some OpenBCI gear this November and take advantage of our “GO BIG NOVEMBER” discount. Get 10% off of all orders of $2,500 or more by using the discount code “GO_BIG_NOVEMBER” at checkout. This discount code applies to all products in the store!

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2. Software Updates

Version 3.1.0 of the OpenBCI GUI launched with new 500 Hz sample rate for Cyton over WiFi. Numerous stability and performance improvements make this our best GUI for Mac, Windows and Linux! Version 3.2.0 beta 2 of the GUI was released this week which adds three 3 new Cyton widgets. A widget for digital pin reading, analog pin reading and a new data marking mode for event related research! Try it out and open issues if you find any bugs!

The Cyton firmware hits 3.1.0 and is a really nice and stable firmware! The biggest stability improvements were with custom sample rates. The the debug port, (external serial port) was not working and the daisy sample rate was not being set, so sample rate was always at 250Hz.

New WiFi firmware 1.3.0 is out now in two versions. DefaultFirmware is optimized for high speed streaming into the OpenBCI GUI or NodeJS drivers. WiFiRawToJSON is optimized for the WiFi shield converting raw values to scientific values into JSON and sending out over TCP or MQTT. We are working really hard to bring stability and speed to the WiFi shield, if you have any issues please open an issue!

Push The World and NEBA Health released RFduino firmware for the Cyton that allows for 2 channels of 24bit data at a sample rate of 125Hz over BLE along with a NodeJS driver. AJ Keller wrote up a community post detailing the three month project.

Lastly, in an attempt to fix macOS Ganglion connection issues, we built something amazing! The Ganglion now works within the chrome web browser! Community member Alex Castillo lended his expertise to help us convert our NodeJS Utility module to work in the browser and wrote a web bluetooth ganglion ble example using v0.3.0 of openbci-utilties.

This month we want to share a new performance art piece, called Hive Mind, that uses OpenBCI to explore the future of human cognition!

In Hive Mind, two performers engage the audience in an on-stage conversation, but they do it without speaking any words. Instead, the brain rhythms of each performer directly generates pulses of light and sound to create an immersive environment that synchronizes the brain oscillations of viewers. The work is based on neuroscientific research showing that rhythmic stimuli can entrain neuronal oscillations to alter perception, reaction times, and memory formation. By reading live EEG from OpenBCI headsets, each performer’s brainwaves become the stimuli that entrains the other performer’s brain patterns and a public brainwave-driven conversation unfolds between the performers. Together the performers and audience go on a journey through different induced brain states and altered perceptions, ultimately considering broad implications for the future of augmented and cooperative cognition.

The work was created by artist and Neuroscience PhD, Produce Consume Robot (a.k.a. Sean Montgomery), and his colleagues.

More information can be found at http://produceconsumerobot.com/hivemind/

Go Sean!

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We recently added this section to our newsletter to celebrate the amazing scientists who use OpenBCI to facilitate and publish research! From now on we will share recent publications by people around the world using OpenBCI for academic research and that we think deserve an cool OpenBCI research badge! We hope this research inspires others to do BCI research and share their approaches and results.

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Title: EMG Signal Controlled Transhumeral Prosthetic with EEG-SSVEP Based Approach for Hand Open/Close

Authors: Isuru Ruhunage, Chamika Janith Perera, Kalinga Nisal, Janaka Subodha, Thilina Dulantha Lalitharatne

Abstract:
Lack of forearm muscles in transhumeral amputees is one of the major issues when it comes to control of upper-limb prosthetic arms using only EMG signals. Brain signal is one of the alternative input signals that can be explored to recognize the motion intention of the users and subsequently can be used to control the upper-limb prosthetic hands. This paper proposes a transhumeral prosthetic arm which is controlled using both EMG and EEG signals… (READ MORE)

Why it gets the OpenBCI cool badge? 
We always get asked if it is possible to control prosthetics with our Hardware! The answer is always yes and in this paper the Sri Lanka based engineers use two methods to do so (EMG as well as an SSVEP-based EEG system).

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We hope that your experience with OpenBCI has been awesome! We are constantly trying to improve the OpenBCI platform. For this reason, we ask that you give us 5 minutes of your time, and complete our latest survey.

Neurotech@Berkeley TalkConor recently gave a talk on “The Future of Open Source Brain-Computer Interfacing” at UC Berkeley. Thank you to the passionate and hard-working students of Berkeley’s Neurotech@Berkeley club for organizing the event and showing up in full force!

From everyone at OpenBCI, we want to say thank you. Your support is making the open-source Neurorevolution possible. We look forward to getting the latest OpenBCI technology into your hands. If you have any questions, comments, or concerns, don’t hesitate to reach out: [email protected].

Kind regards,

The OpenBCI Team

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