Programming the Ganglion and Simblee broken link
I have a Ganglion board that I'd like to reprogram to use the GPIO for custom features. I'm trying to follow the instructions to flash the firmware. The Simblee board files link is broken. How do I install the Simblee board in Arduino? Do I need to mod the config files as hinted in the documentation, or is this deprecated? I don't want to brick my Ganglion, which works fine now.
If it's relevant: I have a pretty ancient version of the firmware (I pre-ordered the Ganglion in 2016). I have a Sparkfun FTDI Friend I'm planning to use to flash the board.
Comments
I will look into this now. We updated the Docs on Tuesday of this week, though this sounds like an external link to a static resource that should not have moved.
@xcorr Can you be more specific as to the exact link that is broken?
I see the broken link now referencing Google Drive.
Xcorr, hi.
re: GPIO 'custom features' on Ganglion
Perhaps you may want to describe a little more what you are trying achieve? Using digital OUTPUT pins on a microvolt sensitive EEG amplifier is problematic. This is because digital level signals are 0V for false and 3.3V for true. Whereas EEG input signal levels are in microvolts, millionths of a volt. Thus any GPIO output will very likely induce through capacitive / inductive coupling to nearby wires, potential distortions / noise in the incoming EEG electrode wires.
And conversely, if you were envisioning GPIO INPUT, one problem is that there is very little 'bandwidth' available in the Ganglion radio packets, to encode any additional digital information. The radio data stream is already heavily compressed.
So a common recommendation for GPIO applications, is to just utilize another microcontroller as your GPIO device. For example if you are using a Raspberry Pi 4, the Ganglion dongle can plug into the Pi. And the Pi has GPIO capability.
There are some related threads on programming the Ganglion, I'll link on the next post.
William
https://openbci.com/forum/index.php?p=/discussion/2736/ganglion-ota-programming-for-windows
@wjcroft I was thinking of using the GPIO pins to flash an LED so I can synchronize the Ganglion to a USB webcam. There's D2 but the webcam is not directly looking at the Ganglion - you think it's going to mess us the signal to turn the GPIO pins on and off? In any I would still like to upgrade and poke around the firmware.
@xcorr On it. Discussing with OpenBCI team on how to make this resource available again. I believe I have located the files.
Instead, maybe try to start the webcam recording after sending the command to start streaming data from the Ganglion to PC. Yes there would be a slight delay, but not much. You could probably run some offline tests beforehand to calculate this delay, and then account for it. The webcam refresh rate has to be at least half as slow as the Ganglion's ability to process a command.
I mean programmatically with a Python script. And you could use BrainFlow Python binding + BrainFlow filters to collect data just fine. Also, there is a "Marker mode" function in BrainFlow now.