Vamp trouble

[qnoirhomme]

Hi,

I am new to BCI2000 and I would like to use it with a Vamp. However, I encounter some problem with it and I wanted to know if anybody has any experiment with both running together.

First of all, brain vision recorder is perfectly running on my computer (it means that my Vamp is perfectly working), I installed the BCI2000 source code with the last version of turbo C++ from Borland and while testing with signal source generator instead of Vamp, everything is working.

I tested the BCI2000 with computer running either under windows XP or Vista. While using Vista, BCI2000 stop just after starting the Vampsource.exe and I got an error message telling me something like Vampsource has to stop and Microsoft will look for the problem. So I stopped using Vista.

With XP, the Vamp is running on some computer but not on others. In the last case, If I do not provide a device number, the application told me that he detected a Vamp with number 0. Then I provide the number and while setting the configuration, I got an other error message saying
VampADC::Initialize error opening device 23425215, with every time another number. While I force the device number to be 106 - which is the number I got on the running computer- I got an error message saying vAmpSource.exe has encountered a problem and needs to close.

For the computer, I got both bci2000 and the Vamp running together, the signal is so tiny (nearly a flat line) that I can not be sure I record anything. I try to play with the number of channel, the signal amplitude or the gain but it does not change.

Does any of you has encounter such problem ?

Last question, does anybody has a parameter file for the Vamp that he could send to me ?

Sorry for being so long.

Thanks in advance for any help

Quentin

[jawilson]

Hello Quentin,
I believe that the problem might be that the v-amp dlls were not copied to the BCI2000/prog/ folder. I have updated the Wiki with instructions, but in short, you want to go to the BCI2000/src/extlib/brainproducts/vamp/ folder, and copy the two files that end in .dll to the BCI2000/prog/ folder. This should allow the vAmpSource.exe program to run correctly.

Hopefully this fixes the problem with the v-amp serial number and BCI2000 configuration; obviously, it works fine for me, or I would not have added the code to BCI2000 . If not, this is something that needs to be fixes, and hopefully I can reproduce your problems here to fix it.

Either way, update us when you have more information.
Thanks!

Adam Wilson
University of Wisconsin-Madison

[qnoirhomme]

Hi Adam,

Thanks for your help. Now it's working.

I still have some trouble but only with the viewing. I wonder why I need to reduce the online viewing scale to -5 to 5 muV to see some signal. While checking with the BrainVision recorder program the scale is 100 muV. It's probably something with my setting but I use the standard one.

Another problem I had and I solved, was that while running BrainVision recorder and then the BCI2000 on the same computer one after the other, I could not detect properly the Vamp. BCI2000 told me that he find only Vamp device with number 0 but while putting 0 in device number, the BCI2000 crashed. This was due to the fact that the BrainVision recorder starter a kind of server that kept working after leaving the BrainVision recorder and prevented me to properly connect to the Vamp.

I also had the device number 0 problem after BCI2000 crashed but in that case, it was due to a VampSource.exe still running after the crash.

Thanks again for your help,

Quentin