Sunday, November 16, 2014

My Kickstarter OpenBCI Arrived!

It's arrived!  It's arrived!  My OpenBCI Kickstarter award has arrived!  And now, the guilty pleasure of unpacking a new piece of tech...


Sure, Joel and Conor did send me an early unit for me to test for them, but yesterday I received my actual purchased unit.  For their Kickstarter back in January, I choose the "OpenBCI Board -- Early Bird Special".  Based on their description, I thought that I'd get just the OpenBCI board.  It turns out that I got quite a bit more!


As you can see in center of the picture above, I got the OpenBCI board (8-bit version) as well as the USB Bluetooth dongle.  That was expected.  Looping around the outside are all the extra pieces that I didn't expect.  Starting from the left side of the picture, I got: a 4xAA battery holder, an OpenBCI sticker and sew-on patch, an OpenBCI T-Shirt, a set of electrode adapters, and two little bags of solderable female headers (for expanding the functionality of the OpenBCI board and of the dongle).  That's some good stuff!

Thanks, OpenBCI!

5 comments:

  1. Thanks a lot for awesome blog :) I had a question, can i get openbci to connect to my android mobile device via bluetooth?

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    Replies
    1. Thanks for the kind words!

      In theory, OpenBCI can connect directly to an Android device, if the Android device supports BTLE (a new flavor of Bluetooth). Many (most? all?) newer Android devices have BTLE, but if your device is a year or two (or more) old, it might not.

      What is missing is an Android app that can receive the data from the OpenBCI board. I think that OpenBCI is working on one, but I haven't seen it yet.

      A while back, I did kludge together an OpenBCI V2 board with an Bluetooth 2.2 breakout board (the Sparkfun "BlueSMiRF") and sent some data to an old Samsung Android tablet. It worked, so I was pleased. But, it was not a smooth nor pretty setup.

      Now that OpenBCI V3 has BTLE built-in, it should be much nice...once an app is written.

      Chip

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    2. Awesome, Thanks for the reply !!
      I still have to receive my board. So desperately waiting to "let the hacking begin". I have made android apps before, as well as connected Sparkfun "BlueSMiRF" on arduino to my phone recently for a class project. Making custom app myself should be very doable. Really cannot wait to add mobility to BCI !!
      Is there any way I can get the board faster? :( I mailed Conor few weeks back, did not get any reply, though I understand they are busy.

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    3. Great work on connecting to your phone over bluetooth. Do you have a link to a post showing your work? I love seeing how other people did it.

      As for getting your OpenBCI board faster...sorry, I've got no power to make that happen.

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  2. Mine arrived too.
    Any idea of where you are supposed to put the battery box with the current Spiderclaw V2 design?

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