Hardware

Brainwaves and electroencephalography (EEG) - hardware

Architecture
With any work with human body one of the most important topic is the safety. ModularEEG has built in galvanic separation that prevents from potential electric shock coming from PC. This solution is good, but not perfect. For example it may not be enough for a clap of thunder. This is especially important, if the measurement is to be done during the night while we are not aware of the weather. Because of that I decided to use PC that has no wired connection with public energy power. Two potential candidates here are: laptop or PDA. I decided to go with PDA because it is perfectly quiet (no moving parts). I bought Ipaq PDA and installed linux Familiar on it. It works great! Aside from safety, this solution has another great advantage: portability. The work can be done at any place for example close to nature. Power can be provided from AA batteries.

Active electrodes
I have been experimenting with active electrodes design. The goal is the ability to use electrodes without skin preparation. The results of my research are here

New firmware
I implemented new version of firmware v21 for modularEEG. The main goal was to minimize packet length and have bidirectional communication. Instead of 17 bytes in P2, it is now 3 bytes for one channel. It makes a difference on PDA linux with limited buffers and low processing power.

Portable eeg device
I have an idea for new eeg device that will be simpler, cheaper and more portable then modularEEG.