Artists Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno have launched an online store where they sell their brain control interface gear as well as offer free downloads of their design files for 3d printable EEG headsets and code for both hardware and software. By making their mind control technology completely open source, they hope to see a surge in creativity and community. From Spectrum IEEE:
With Friday’s launch of an online store selling their brain-computer interface (BCI) gear, Joel Murphy and Conor Russomanno hope to unleash a wave of neurotech creativity. Their system enables DIYers to use brain waves to control anything they can hack—a video game, a robot, you name it. “It feels like there’s going to be a surge,” says Russomanno. “The floodgates are about to open.” And since their technology is open source, the creators hope hackers will also help improve the BCI itself.
Their OpenBCI system makes sense of an electroencephalograph (EEG), signal, a general measure of electrical activity in the brain captured via electrodes on the scalp. The fundamental hardware component is a relatively new chip from Texas Instruments, which takes in analog data from up to eight electrodes and converts it to a digital signal. Russomanno and Murphy used the chip and an Arduino board to create OpenBCI, which essentially amplifies the brain signal and sends it via Bluetooth to a computer for processing. “The big issue is getting the data off the chip and making it accessible,” Murphy says. Once it’s accessible, Murphy expects makers to build things he hasn’t even imagined yet.
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