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Open-Source Hardware For Neuroscience
the_newsbeagle (2532562) writes "The equipment that neuroscientists use to record brain signals is plenty expensive, with a single system costing upward of $60,000. But it turns out that it's not too complicated to build your own, for the cost of about $3000. Two MIT grad students figured out how to do just that, and are distributing both manufactured systems and their designs through their website, Open Ephys. Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments."
Their goal is to launch an open-source hardware movement in neuroscience, so researchers can spend less time worrying about the gear they need and more time doing experiments.
My experiences with lab-built equipment in academia suggest that building your own equipment is not really a good way to "spend less time worrying about the gear". Usually you will spend quite a lot of your time worrying about DIY gear. The advantages are not in time saved, but in two other things: 1) you can build gear that would be prohibitively expensive to purchase; and 2) you can customize it in-house.
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
These are not doctors and patients, but researchers. And the device in question is a passive recorder of brain activity (AFAIK).
Also, I don't think that many people want to record the brain activity of mice, so the biggest cost here is that the equipment is pretty custom made causing big non-recurring expenses.
Furthermore, an IC subcontractor had made a miniturized four dedicated custom ICs into one, and from the article it sounds this device was the first to use the new chip. Expect all other manufacturers to jump to this new chip too, probably shaving off big % of the total price.
This is news only for the intersection of the sets "neuroscientists" and "nerd". The rest of us are happily unafected.
This Kickstarter project looks promising.
https://www.kickstarter.com/pr...
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
So how does it differ from OpenEEG project? I read the summary and I read a couple of paragraphs from their site, but it was all some round talk. You can get fully assembled 2 channel (uses smt components - it's small) OpenEEG device from Olimex for 99 euros (+electrodes and shipping costs), if you are not into soldering.
But these companies do have the following.
Ability to buy in bulk, tax write off on all the parts they buy, vendor competition.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
When a paper is published it should include the methodology used to gather the results, and if that includes a lot of untested and uncertified pieces of kit then it's going to cast serious doubts as to the validity of the findings. Have they actually found something of significance, or are they just prodding round some experimental error which wouldn't be there if they used tried and tested setups? It'll be fine for teaching, and that will help it to gain some credibility, but for a lot of research it's going to take a long time to gain acceptance without a large testing and certification budget behind it.
404 Not Found: No such file or resource as '.sig'
With all your rage, you missed the point.
And the point is not that self-built instruments are incapable of being validated, but that you'll have to include the effort for validating them (and documenting the validation) yourself. This costs a lot of time, and, unless your time doesn't cost anything, money.
In fact I just checked their schematics.. no secondary isolation, and power taken from the USB or from an external PSU (not supplied or specified)
computer power supplies provide less isolation and allow higher leakage currents than a medical grade PSU, let alone one rated for BF. So it doesn't even meet basic electrical safety, let alone any other parts of IEC60601. I personally woun't want this used on me..
This has always bothered me with the current state of neuroscience: The whole point of nerves/brain matter is to communicate/remember/transform information, but we're still relying on crude external cues like heat/bloodflow/electrical activity to tell us "somethings happening around...here", and that's pretty much it. It always bothers me when I hear the term "brain signals".
Nerves should be able to query their neighbors about their state, and the state of other nerves - otherwise, they wouldn't really be able to form something like a mind (as in, "the mind is what the brain does"). Why still can't we find a way to just "ask" the nerves what their state is?
Even in our simulations, we just represent nerves as nodes that grow associations - but those associations are useless, unless they can be traversed in queries by the system, to gather inputs, and send outputs at all levels.
Are we getting anywhere close to a stage where we can communicate with nerves to use that same communication system that logically must exist for it to function? Seems like even with limitations, that would be a LOT more useful than analogously inferring from traffic levels what the function of buildings in a city are, like we're doing now.
Ryan Fenton
I don't think this is as big of a problem as you do.
Regardless of the instrument's origin (bought for big $ from company or open source built), scientists are going to run positive controls. It's a common practice for GOOD experiments. In this case, apply treatment X to a mouse, and you should see response Y as measured by the instrument. If you don't see response Y in the positive control, you cannot trust experimental results. If the positive control give expected results, then reviewers have little choice but to accept the experimental result.
You need to do the same thing for fancypants commercial instruments to make certain they are working properly, operated properly, and the rest of the experimental variables (the mice, the treatment) are as expected.
Bottom line is that if the homebrew instruments work reliably for the positive controls, they will be easily accepted.
Good thing you're not a mouse.
I seem to recall that years and years ago Steve Ciarcia wrote a series of article in his Circuit Cellar magazine about making sensors and a home built EEG. If I recall correctly it used relatively inexpensive parts and off the shelf sensors when necessary. All designed for the hobbyist and much lower in cost. Of course I may be wrong. But still wondering, whats the big hoo haw about something this expensive?
Looking over the analog guys' shoulders at work, I've seen a nifty little piece of software that takes the geometry of your ground plane and its connections, and tells you where exactly you'll need to put your Cs to minimize ground plane effects.
This is neat since it shows you that just placing Cs next to your components connections doesn't work the way you thought it would.
60 cycle creeps in *EVERYWHERE*.
You mean 60 Hz line frequency? Well, wait until you design devices for an international market. You'll have environments completely free of 60 Hz line stuff there, unfortunately, that usually means you'll have to deal with 50 Hz. Have fun testing your device for behavior with 60 Hz line frequency in a 50 Hz line frequency country. Oh .. and be sure to keep those harmonics in mind.
Oh, and debugging these devices is its own kind of hell, since connecting your microcontrollers emulator breaks any kind of isolation and makes the device behave differently. Ugh.
Capacitors leak DC.
More generalized, it should be: There are no resistors, capacitors or coils. Anything that claims to be one of the three is actually an RLC circuit, and you will see them behaving as one at the worst possible moment. Yes, your resistor has capacity and inductance; yes, your capacitor leaks DC, etc.