which hardware to use with BCI2000

[marohde]

hello,

i wondered which EEG hardware works best with BCI2000.

i have worked on 1 project so far with BCI2000 and a gtec system. I really liked the software and how well it works together with the hardware. however, there are some things i dislike about the gtec system - strange artifacts, flimsy cables, no way to check skin impedence...

if in the future i would have funds to buy a different EEG system, which one can you recommend and is it as straight forward to use with bci2000?

thanks

Marieke

[gschalk]

Marieke,

I don't know about their cables, but you should not get artifacts. Also, you can measure impedance (at least with the USBamp) within BCI2000.

Gerv

[marohde]

thanks Gerv!

I should have mentioned that we use their active electrodes - does this make a difference to what you said about the skin impedence measurement? We need to work with those as there is lots of noise in the set-up room.

We called the company a number of times and send them pictures of the artifacts (seeming massive discharges) and they find them strange, too - they are just to variable and irreproducible to actually track them down to a channel, a contact or an electrode... (following murphy's law, they mainly show up when it really matters) but that's a different question, really. maybe i am being unfair to their hardware based on this personal experience.

anyways, are there other systems that work straight-forwardly with BCI2000?

Marieke

[gschalk]

Hi,

I do not think you can principally measure impedance with any active electrodes system, regardless what manufacturer.

It seems like your issues were mainly related to substantial environmental noise rather than any hardware problems. I do not know whether you still have access to these devices, but try them in an environment without noise. I bet the results will be better.

BrainVision amps should work fine with BCI2000 as well.

Gerv

[marohde]

I do not think you can principally measure impedance with any active electrodes system, regardless what manufacturer.

...there seem to be systems that indicate a good connection with an LED directly on the electrode.

[tcetin]

BrainVision amps should work fine with BCI2000 as well.

Gerv

Yes, we use the BrainProducts BrainVision and it works very well, at least after we overcame some initial problems.
The only issue we have here at the moment is that the capability of the BCI2000s P300Classifier for calibration of the P300 sessions seems to be related to how much current the battery is supplying, i.e. it does not run if recorded with the battery not fully charged. But thats all, otherwise BrainVision and BCI2000 work very well together...