Ironbci: Open-Source Brain Computer Interface
github.com
github.com
Other than that it went swimmingly.
Yeah there’s an extinction event but it isn’t entirely the industrial revolution to blame since people have been driving animals into extinction for thousands of years starting, at least, with the megafauna extinctions.
It’s sad but organisms have been getting out competed, and reshaping the atmosphere and climate, for billions of years. We can pretend humans are some anomaly and that we aren’t part of nature but that isn’t the case. This extinction event will give rise to new organisms that will fill new niches just like every other one has.
1. https://www.worldvision.org/sponsorship-news-stories/global-...
2. https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/world-population-in-extre...
So you can quip about me being American, I am, but that doesn’t change that the industrial revolution has brought untold wealth and economic, if not political, freedoms to a majority of people on the planet.
Today, in the USA, corporations are incredibly powerful, surveillance technology is growing faster than legal frameworks or consumers can keep up with, and there's little expectation of or coordinated resistance from uninformed, irrational, impotent consumers or effective regulation from our partisan and captive governmental agencies. That hasn't always been true - at other times, colonial governments, monarchies, feudal leaders, tribal leaders, or religious leaders have held power. It probably won't be true in perpetuity.
The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
Edit: I'm reminded of qntm's excellent short story "Lena" at https://qntm.org/mmacevedo - about "the earliest executable image of a human brain". I won't spoil it, other than to say that it's something of a horror story, depending on your worldview and the depth of your imagination.
why the lack of nuance?
But I, like a great many people both on this website and worldwide, spend most of my working life entering data into a computer (and reading it out of a monitor), and derive a great deal of utility from data entered into a computer, so it's reasonable to assume that it will result in significant changes.
> The trick is to make sure that we only open Pandora's Box of brain-computer interfaces (or better and also more frighteningly, full-brain upload and emulation) technology when society is ready...
I don't think this will be the case. We unleashed social media on portable devices immediately. That's a strong suggestion that there will be no pauses to think about it.
It's somehow more dark and evil than any cyberpunk dystopia while being boring and beige at the same time.
It's read-only, ofc.
Until one drives the electrodes with some voltage.
Then it becomes Transcranial Electrical Stimulation
It might end up slightly cheaper. They use the ADS1299 Analog-to-Digital Converter, which is $40 (DACs are usually one of the largest costs of BCIs). So it seems like the all-in cost won’t be much cheaper than OpenBCI.
Hopefully I’m wrong and someone will correct me because I’d love to see a research-grade BCI for ~$100-$200 (not sure about Muse 2 but my neuroscientist friend called Muse 1 “a fun toy, but still a toy”… sadly that’s the closest I’ve found so far.)
dunno about signal or clock quality though. (i suppose that's a function of the intan package)
There was a lot of exciting stuff being worked on 2007-2010 in that field.
still an order of magnitude cheaper than the systems i knew and open source to boot.
It's just very hard to sustain a business on one-off low volume hardware sales so the prices on the official site are relatively high compared to BOM (but perfectly reasonable and necessary to sustain further R&D).
It seems many hobbyists will buy off aliexpress while institutions / researchers tend to get the "official" hardware.
If you're happy with 8 channels wired (run laptop off batteries and use a good USB opto-isolator...) then you can get that right now for about 200 USD (not including headware).
(Note: better to get a 32-bit board not 8-bit one).
I run a low-volume open source hardware business[1] and honestly don't buy this argument at all.
So many OSHW businesses have absolutely woeful logistics that treats every single person outside of the US (or occasionally EU) as an afterthought.
This both what drives up the cost and pisses people off enough to create a sustainable business model for the boys in Shenzhen.
People aren't going to support your business if you ask insultingly high shipping prices or are constantly out of stock.
Based on your background I expect you have more insight than me, but I do wonder if they have deliberately abandoned the low end of the market to Shenzhen to avoid cannibalising (much more profitable) institutional sales.
Give in to your urges! Only material consumption can bring happiness! :P
>I do wonder if they have deliberately abandoned the low end of the market to Shenzhen to avoid cannibalising (much more profitable) institutional sales.
I wouldn't be super surprised by that. I've been on both sides of the fence there and whether or not the product itself is good value tends to be much less important than whether or not the sales process makes the purchasing department feel important.
Also funny you bring up the Muse, as I actually worked there a few years back. The Muse 2 is a reasonable increase in signal fidelity though with a tradeoff in that it has more issues in adverse environmental conditions (sweat etc). The main difference between the generations is in usability on the consumer end, which is the target market for the device. It was never intended to be a research tool, and it excludes many of the important electrode locations for research. For that reason, calling it a toy is roughly accurate in my opinion.
open access here)
open access to the paper here