FilePlayBack

[a.baldi]

Hi, I recently became responsible of a BCI team that is developing an application to control a robotic arm. I'm not familiar with BCI2000, and I need your help.
We need to feed the BCI2000 program with data gathered from the field, and not a continuous sample coming from an EEG apparatus i.e. using a suitable driver to read data from the disc and not from a physical device. In our situation data will be collected by external personnel with their own equipment (not BCI2000) and then exported to ASCII format.
How can we playback the data collected to test our configuration/algorithm? We were given some hints about FilePlayBack module, but in its wiki-page I don't catch the sentence "A source module that replays EEG data from BCI2000 .dat files.".
Does it mean the data has to be recorded strictly by BCI2000?
Thank you for your attention.

[gschalk]

Hi,

A Source module in BCI2000 is basically the hardware driver that supports a particular device. The FilePlayBack module realizes such a component, but spits out data that were recorded in a file. Because there are an infinite number of possibilities for arbitrary file formats, and there are some further requirements to make its function meaningful within BCI2000 (e.g., it needs to have the file format define the sampling rate and other parameters), it cannot support all possible file formats. To adapt the FilePlaybackModule to support other file formats, you need to change its C++ code. All C++ code is available on SVN. The Wiki has tutorials on writing Source modules, so this should give good information.

Gerv

[boulay]

If you need something quick and you are more familiar with Matlab than C++ then you could try BCI2000/tools/matlab/create_bcidat.m to convert your ASCII files to BCI2000 dat files. However, if using ASCII files is going to be a regular part of your workflow then you should probably stick with Gerv's suggestion.