Are there any DIY neuro enthusiasts at the Van Hack Space?
I’ve been tinkering with and blogging about EEG and BCI (The Autodidacts, NeuroBB) and I’d be keen to meet up with other amateur neuroscientists next time I come through Vancouver.
I’d be happy to bring an OpenBCI EEG board to show around. (I’ve been working with OpenBCI since they launched, and have now backed their new $99 EEG board on Kickstarter, so I’ll have two soon )
Not at VHS, but I’ve been playing with emotiv and interaxon headsets. I have an openBCI but haven’t done much with it yet. Love to hear what you’re doing with them! I gave a biohacking talk at nanaimo makerspace last weekend and spent a couple minutes describing my EEG stuff… http://youtu.be/KIvinZBEk9Q
@derekja Cool! What’s your impression of the Muse? I haven’t gotten my hands on one yet but it seems quite popular with the DIY crowd. How’s signal quality compare to the OpenBCI or Emotiv? Is there much of a neuro (or general maker) community in Victoria?
@Majicj I don’t know much about the therapeutic end of EEG, but according to John N. Demos’s Getting Started With Neurofeedback TBI (Traumatic Brain Injury) produces signatures that can be picked up with an EEG. And there’s a lot of research into the efficacy of using Neurofeedback to help patients recover from concussions and more serious TBIs — most of which seems to be positive, if not conclusive. So I think the answer is yes, EEG can spot symptoms of TBI, and Neurofeedback is used to treat it.
What entrainment modalities have you tried @hjsvhsweb ? I’ve experimented with Binaural Beats a bit, and also tried tiny bits visual entrainment using SSVEP (Steady State Visually Evoked Potentials). It would be fun to see if we could find EEG entrainment from Holosync! (We’re planning a second binaural beat trial, and the Centerpointe institute is on our list of possible binaural beat providers.)
EPOC, EPOC+, or Insight? (assuming EPOC/+ because the Insight uses dry electrodes. I have an EPOC but the electrode cups corroded and the battery died after a year in storage, and I have yet to revive it — I didn’t find it exactly maker-friendly to begin with, though)
Aha — I had no idea there were so many people into this stuff at the the VHS! Do you have access to the raw data (Develper/Research SDK, or … Emokit), or are you using Emotiv’s software?
It’s odd, but I haven’t seen any build-it-yourself EEG kits. It seems like there would be. Maybe the companies figure if you don’t know enough to build it from scratch you’d probably mess it up . The closest thing I’ve seen is the Omilex’s PCB-only OpenEEG. (also, several people on the OpenBCI forums have built their own versions of the board, and John Ruelas is doing some neat stuff over on EEG64.com)
Let’s see here, most of what I have isn’t diy, pricing in this space has come
down a bit over the years, but diy was a hard slog without the internet “back
in the day”.
Buying an EEG was not an option. Most of the gear that was available in the
early 90’s like the Wave Rider EEG’s are still available but typically cost
$1500 and up… still…
I’ve wanted to build an EEG machine since I first came across plans when I
was about 13 or 14 in the Wolverton’s book: How to Build a Lie Detector,
Brain Wave Monitor and Other Secret Parapsychological Electronics Projects
just ordered that actually, eta is Jan 21 to Feb 23, 2016
Pretty impressive for 1982. I have dreams of taking some of the tech in there
and updating it with modern electronics. The one I’ve played with a bit
(without success) over the years is getting my plants to play music to me
Basically a wheatstone bridge attached to electrodes on the leaves, which
goes to a music synthesizer, each plant being setup to play a different
instrument. That was all discreet electronics then, now a computer or RPi
could probably handle that once the input methods are sorted out. Hmmm maybe
that’ll be my project at the space in 2016…
I photocopied most of the interesting projects back in the 80’s and have that
in a binder somewhere around here.
I still have one of the original FutureMind pc based Light/Sound machines
that ran as a dos program. First read about that in Michael Hutchinson’s
Megabrain or Megabrain 2000 book. I still keep an ibm laptop around to run
that, but I don’t think I’ve fired that up in 7-10 years and the company
behind the FutureMind have been out of business quite a bit longer.
I have the MindPlace Sirius Light/Sound machine. That gets used occaisionally
at night in bed, typically to amplify the effect of some other brain
entrainment audio I am listening too.
Used to use that in conjunction with the FutureMind.
I think that’s all the hardware I have.
I’ve got the first level of the Centerpointe CD’s, prior to you going to
customized levels. I have cassette tapes of a bunch of the Monroe Institute
Programs, some Richard Bandler (NLP) Neurosynchronizer tapes. Several other
self hypnosis tapes involving dual induction, basically 2 voices, 1 in each
each, kinda mind blowing… Some Kelly Howell tapes, cd’s and more recently
her mp3 based programs.
She’s recently came out with an app for Android, but I haven’t had a chance
to play with it yet.
I also have the iDoser app on my phone and a number of doses
I also have and use NeuroProgrammer 3 on a 7" HP Stream tablet running
Windows 10 which has been my holy grail for the past 20+ years, basically
handheld pc based mobile entrainment.
I’ve also been wanting to buy a Neurophone and after the recent successful
indegogo campaign, the price is now at a reasonable level, mind you given the
US to CDN $ spread now, pricing really hasn’t come down much
Another item I’ve been looking at getting is the Shakti 8 coil unit, this was
a DIY long before you could buy finished product, still pretty ammenable to
DIY.
The “more on that later bit”. Mind Workstation can use the EEG, primarily the
Emotiv stuff, along with the Procyon and other gear to both display current
entrainment states, but also, to RESPOND to the states driving the
entrainment further down a certain path.
That ability to have a direct feedback loop between entrainment and
monitoring is again one my holy grail’s.
Once I’ve received the replacement sensor pack for the Epoch+ sitting here
and once the Procyon I’ll be ordering shortly arrives in early January, I
plan to put this into action using the HP Stream tablet.
I think that covers me off for where I am at and where I plan to go.
I expect I’ll also be getting in on the current OpenBCI campaign so I have
something to play with when I return the Epoc+ to my colleague. As a side
comment, I particulary dislike the licensing terms Emotiv “offers” so I don’t
consider it a long term product I’d keep using.
I’ve been fairly happy with the Muse. It is easy to get a good fitting (at least on my balding head!) and the app is a decent meditation app. The programming environment seems decent too, although I have been neck-deep in a project on the Emotiv so I haven’t played with it as much as I’d wanted to. Ironically, if I had realized at the outset that the Muse has an additional sensor port that you can add another electrode to I might have used it from the start rather than the Emotiv (I needed access to top of the head and the sensors on the Muse are really only able to be used frontally.)
Re: Emotiv. Absolutely agree that their licensing model is crap. The Epoc is decent in terms of quality and performance, although the sensors corrode out way too fast. I’ve taken to removing the felts and storing them separately from the rest of the electrode, which I actually leave attached to the headset so that the ridiculously weak plastic bits on the screw in threads don’t break. I have not been impressed with the Insight. Inflexible electrode locations and a difficulty in getting reading through hair have been my main complaints.
Still think the OpenBCI is the best bet for DIY, though. I built an OpenEEG some years ago (that’s the Olimex board referenced above) and it works well, but the design is now dated and the OpenBCI is wireless.
Actually just remembered I do have 1 device which is EEG, but no longer
supported easily, ie no updated drivers or software since it was sold off to
another company that doesn’t seem to actually doing anything with it.
I haven’t touched it in years mainly due to the fact the software and drivers
I have only run on XP x86 and not anything more modern from what I remember.
There were some projects developing opensource drivers and such, but I think
most have fallen by the wayside.
Harondel J. Sibble
Sibble Computer Consulting Ltd.
Creating Solutions for the small and medium business computer user. harondel@pdscc.com (use pgp keyid 0x3CC3CFCE not 0x3AD5C11D) http://www.pdscc.com
Blog: http://www.pdscc.com/blog
(604) 739-3709 (voice)
Working on a PhD at uvic to develop event-related potential (erp) based
neurofeedback techniques for attentional disorders on consumer grade eeg
headsets.
Looks like you’ve been at it for a while @hjsvhsweb Do you have a background in a related field or are you just rather curious?
If any of them are out of copyright maybe you should scan then and throw them up on the internet. Those kinds of thing tend to disappear…
Have you tried running an EEG simultaneously with a light/sound machine to look for changes in the EEG that would match the intended entrainment effect? If so, what did you find?
What did you end up backing of the Ganglion, Ultracortex, and tCDS shield?
Probably. Either the user is entirely responsible, if they build it from scratch … or the company is responsible and they sell wireless, pre-assembled, approved systems that give the user the smallest possible opportunity to mess up. I wonder what kind of licensing hoops OpenBCI will have to go through to get their tCDS add on approved!?
(Nice to hear the other positive reviews of the Muse corroborated. Seems to be one of the better consumer headsets to tinker with. Didn’t know it had a the option of an additional electrode, either… )
A package called BCI2000 on the runtime side and a bunch of matlab code on
top of EEGLab on the analysis side.
re: your entrainment validation question, can I attach files here? Neat
thesis project Mitch Altman pointed me to a couple years ago. I’ll find
some other way of circulating it if this bounces…