A journey into my diy Cyton

Hello folks,
I wanted to share with you my journey into building my Cyton board. To start with, I’m an art student in Germany and my artistic practice is basically built on DIY and science. So I started my journey in August 2025. The biggest challenge was to build a multilayer PCB. I used to build a LOT of PCBs and two layers were never a problem since they’re pretty easy to make. But yeah 4(!!!) a damn big challenge and as far as I know nobody did that, so I had to think a lot how to do it. The challenge was how to connect all 4 layers together. Since I don’t have a way to copper-plate vias, I decided to use copper wires and rivets for that part. After a nerve-racking process and two failed attempts, I’ve managed to finally build the board. My past experiences with watchmaking helped me a lot with the allying of the vias into the small holes.

I then soldered everything together and the board was ready for chapter two.
The next big challenge was to flash the firmwares, but with a lot of research in the forum and on google plus a lot of patience it was finally possible. Here the final result!

I have a bit of packet loss (2-4%) I think due to the thickness of the board and the length of the copper-wire-vias but it works super fine for me…
I also built some active electrodes but I’ll probably make another post dedicated to that.
The next journey will be to build an uploaded/modern version of the Cyton (plus integrated daisy) since the technology used by OpenBCI was good 10-15 years ago but it’s now pretty obsolete and one of the most important component (the RFD22301) is not in production anymore and a pretty old technology. So I hope that I can give you some news soon.
Thanks for reading