OpenBCI Newsletter

April Newsletter

Greetings OpenBCI community! We’re excited to update you on our hard work! This month, every board in our store (Cyton, Daisy, Ganglion, and Wifi Shield) has a software update, bug fix, or updated tutorial! Scroll down to section three for links to the new releases!

Recently, OpenBCI has been seeing a surge of media and academic exposure, concurrent with novel and innovative applications of our open-source EEG/ECG/EMG systems. We post up-to-the-minute OpenBCI developments to our Twitter. Check it out now!

In this Newsletter:

OpenBCI Featured on the Today Show!
2018 BCI Meeting – Join us at Asilomar!
Software/Tutorial Updates
Community Member of the Month
Exciting New Uses of OpenBCI at IBM Watson, MIT Media Lab, UCSD, University of Nottingham and more!
General Survey Link

1. The Today Show Segment

In a collaboration with Mount Sinai Health, Putrino Lab, and SafeForRobots, the Ultracortex Mark IV Headset was used to show the effects of walking and texting on your brain. Jeff Rosen, The Today Show host, volunteered as a demo subject! The electrodes on the headset sense Jeff’s brainwaves and the Cyton Board on the back of his head transmits them, via bluetooth, to our GUI visualizer shown below. The red shows areas of activation in live time!

2. OpenBCI is Sponsoring BCI Meeting!

We’re psyched to announce that we’re GOLD SPONSORS for the Seventh International BCI Meeting: “BCIs: Not Getting Lost in Translation” on May 21-25th, 2018!

The 2018 BCI Meeting will take place on the scenic oceanside grounds of Asilomar Conference Center in Pacific Grove, California, USA. The BCI Meeting brings together scientists, engineers, and clinicians involved in BCI research and clinical use, review the present state of the field, address key issues critical to further progress, and promote the education and participation of young researchers. This meeting and the resulting comprehensive publications should, like its predecessors, contribute greatly to BCI research and development. We’d love to see you there!

3. Software Updates

WiFi: Major bug fix for wifi shield! Bumps version to v2.0.5. Formerly, if your WiFi Shield was searching for a network, the Cyton/Ganglion could have contacted the Shield and caused a crash. The problem was solved by waiting to open a communication connection with the Ganglion or Cyton till a network was joined.

Cyton: Minor bug fix, highly recommended for all WiFi Shield users, that improves stability for Cyton and wifi via v3.1.1. Stability fix will lead to no false starts on OpenBCI GUI. Update today!
We edited the Cyton SDK doc to explain what each command returns to the Cyton board. Now, writing a driver is easier for programmers!

Daisy Module: The “16-channel Add-ons” section of the Ultracortex Mark IV tutorial has been updated with improved images! Also, check out our brand-new Daisy Getting Started Guide!

Ganglion Library: Minor bug fix, highly recommended for all WiFi Shield users, that improves stability for Ganglion and wifi via v2.0.0. Stability fix will lead to no false starts on OpenBCI GUI. Update today!

Miscellaneous: New Cyton NodeJS driver was released this month that fixed some insecurities and is more stable than ever! Check out the latest v1.1.3 Cyton Node JS Driver now! The GUI also now prints out the firmware version of the Cyton on startup so no more need to download and use a serial terminal program to figure out what firmware version you are using. To learn more, check out our Github account and Docs sections! And don’t forget to submit bugs/issues to our repos or ask technical questions on our Forum.

4. Community Member of the Month!

The thing we love most about OpenBCI is our amazingly diverse and inspiring community of hackers, neuroscientists, makers, and more! To celebrate you, we have decided to feature our favorite recent community project in each newsletter. If you are interested in being featured or know someone who has a cool OpenBCI project that they might want to share, please fill out this interest form.

YOU COULD BE NEXT!

This month we want to spread the word about BRAINIMATION, a program to control in-game avatars for individuals with disabilities.

OpenBCI was used to create BRAINIMATION at the CSNE Hackathon by our friend Niveditha Kalavakonda and her team!

For her work on this and her role in advancing women in Computer Science and Programming, she won the SWE Outstanding Female Engineer Award during the SWE Annual Banquet. Amazing work by everyone involved!

5. Cognitive Stories: an Open-source Project by Darwin Ecosystem and IBM Watson

We’re thrilled to announce Cognitive Stories, spearheaded by Darwin Ecosystem and IBM Watson. This is the latest and greatest use of our Ultracortex Mark IV Headset and OpenBCI GUI! This open-source project’s goal is to develop a machine learning system that helps limited individuals communicate by identifying brainwave patterns to detect intentions and express them to people or systems. This is just the beginning of customizable brainwave analysis, and it’s as close as it currently gets to reading minds!

The Cognitive Stories Project has been presented at Twilio 2017 Conference and IBM Think 2018. A huge shout-out to 14-year-old Tanmay Bakshi for his contributions to this project!

6. Community Survey

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.

Your feedback is extremely valuable to us! Your answers will be anonymous and we will post the answers to selected questions in our future newsletters.

OpenBCI Community Survey

Your feedback is extremely valuable to us! Your answers will be anonymous and we will post the answers to selected questions in our future newsletters.

Thank You!

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