Maker Faire was an inspiring experience for the OpenBCI team. We are both very excited and extremely grateful for the incredible amount of support and encouragement we received from fellow creators, scientists, and open-source enthusiasts of the Maker Fair community! Check out our highlight reel below and don’t hesitate to sign up for our mailing list if you want to get involved or just stay in loop as we move foward. We’ll keep you posted on our plans for a future Kickstarter campaign. We sincerely look forward to connecting in more depth with all of the great people we met over the course of the weekend.
The Maker Faire Highlight Reel
Day 1
Saturday kicked off to a great start with Lindsay injecting “electrogoo” into Chip’s electrode cap:
After Chip was thoroughly electrogooed, we streamed his brainwaves into a MatLab application that was performing some FFT conversions on the 8 electrode channels we were sampling:
As the day carried on lots people stopped by the tent to see what this guy in a funny hat was all about. One of our visitors included Kim from BBC! She interviewed Chip about some of the amazing things that people are doing with brain-computer interfaces (BCIs). Check out the pipe-cleaner neuron on Joel’s glasses that Dr. Casebeer’s daughter, Mara, showed us all how to make. Future neuro-wizard in the making.
Later in the day Dr. Bill Casebeer led an inspiring presentation about the amazing open-source EEG DARPA Initiative that supported the development of OpenBCI.
As part of the presentation, our very own Chip Audette gave a quick talk about OpenBCI and the amazing possibilities of putting a fully-open EEG platform in the hands of the open-source community.
It was all smiles at the end of the day on Saturday as the group went home to recoup for day 2.
Day 2
The OpenBCI maker himself, Joel Murphy, started the day off as the brain guinea pig. He showed up ready for business wearing his spiffy blazer and expensive electrogoo hair gel.
Then our favorite visitors of the weekend, Bjorn and his daughter, showed up to test out the OpenBCI setup. Bjorn was adamant that we connect an electrode to his head so he could prove to his daughter that he was a smart as he always told her he was. Despite a natural ability to control his alpha wave rhythms, his daughter still didn’t buy it.
Later in the day I finally got my turn to rock the trendy “braincap” and hone my alpha wave activation skillz.
At the end of the day on Sunday we were extremely honored to receive the Maker Faire Educator’s Choice Award. What an exciting way to cap off a great weekend!
