The third issue of "Fire salon" focusing on hardware and creators

Lei Feng and firewood create a space for the third phase of the hardware and create a discussion on the topic of the "Thunder Fire Salon." This issue is a little special, said to bring products to show the creators because of the weather and other reasons did not appear, and we more than 10 people around to listen to Zyq share his portable brain-computer Interface Project plan.

Brain-machine interface, refers to the collection of brain wave signals and analysis, according to the results of the analysis of the corresponding instructions to control the purpose of the external equipment machine. ZYQ has done some research work in the Neurological Engineering Laboratory of Tianjin University. Interest in this direction is related to one of his experiences in college.

At the undergraduate stage, ZYQ has been confused for some time, or to the library to read some books on philosophy and history, or go to the gym to swim to exercise, the main mind is not in school. In the course of a swim, he met a disabled person, only by his hands, can swim very fast. Two people quickly become friends, learn swimming skills. But every time he landed, the friend refused Zyq's help and struggled to put himself in a wheelchair with his hands. Zyq recalls that moment, in the mind very for these disabled friends to do something. Later learned that the school's Graduate school has brain-computer interface-related research direction, the future may be able to make free control of prosthetic devices, so resolutely chose to read.

It has been five years since ZYQ began to focus on this field to this day. But some of the bottlenecks in the field have failed to fulfill his original desires.

At present, the higher precision of the brain-machine interface, the electrodes must be implanted into the human brain. Because of the biological compatibility problem, this electrode time is long, it will slowly lapse. And this kind of operation may cause certain damage to the patient's brain, cannot popularize at present. Therefore, the medical community is more inclined to use non-invasive brain-computer interface to achieve human-computer interaction. In this way, the electrodes are simply placed on the scalp of the person for signal collection. However, the biological electrical signals from the human brain after the skull will be greatly weakened, coupled with ECG, EMG interference, the target of EEG signal pickup and processing, relatively certain difficulty.

In addition, the current science of brain-computer interface, is often the use of a large professional EEG acquisition equipment to achieve. The cost of making this device is very high and not portable.

In this respect, Zyq hopes to solve the above problems through three stages.

For the first phase of the project, ZYQ intends to use the existing heart electrical products used in the chip, do a brain electrical signal collection function module, hope to be able to collect the minimum 10uV level of weak brain power.

In the second stage, he will join the FPGA based Data signal processing module, and can identify and deal with certain "ideas." FPGA is used because the chip has a very strong parallel digital signal processing capabilities. At present, there is a brain-computer interface, NeuroSky Mindwave chip, is using similar technology at the bottom of the hardware to achieve complex signal processing functions. But the ability to modify the processing of their internal numbers, only NeuroSky their own engineers, which is not conducive to the in-depth development of third parties. And another multi-channel brain-machine interface Emotiv, there is no underlying hardware to support digital signal processing, so or only with the PC to achieve those algorithms, not really portable.

By the third stage, he wanted to add the product to the wireless module and introduce better industrial design, making it more portable and more user-friendly.

It is worth saying that Zyq's project wants to use the power of team and community to create a hardware product that supports two development in the form of open source. In his own words:

"I am a novice in open source, but I am deeply attracted by this idea." My project is more like an experiment, is to hope that the scientific community, industry and the creative community together to promote a certain area of development.

In response to this project, the presence of the creators raised their own questions and opinions.

According to the target customers of ZYQ, it is set to be a company in the field of creation, scientific research and some corresponding fields. According to the long tail theory, now and future sales channels will be more and more easy, for example, Taobao, ebay group of an account can be sold. More crucially, can the product be made known to its audiences?

Some time ago, there is a Development Board team with Open source China cooperation, one weeks shipments of more than 1000. But because the service is not in time to keep up with the support, the final cooperation suspended. For a ZYQ project, it will face similar problems in the future, requiring documentation and technical support during product grinding to avoid further trouble for the future.

In addition, there is a difference between the user expectation and the actual effect of the product. ZYQ also admits that "the initial product may be ' disappointing ' and it needs an evolutionary process." "In addition to the use of community and scientific upgrading algorithms, in the future, he also considered the establishment of the corresponding cloud services, through the cloud to achieve complex algorithm problems." This requires a relatively good mobile network, perhaps the arrival of 4G can solve some of the problems.

If you have any other questions or suggestions for this project, please contact ZYQ. (Email: billyuqizhang@msn.com, Weibo: @ Severus sudden death)