A DIY Brain-Computer Interface

Computers are getting faster all the time, but the speed at which we can interface with them has not changed much since the dawn of the personal computing era. Despite the development of a plethora of input devices, from voice recognition systems to touchscreens, nothing tops keyboards in terms of data entry speed and accuracy. That leaves us with a major bandwidth bottleneck that is going to prevent us from becoming more productive and efficient in the future. We will effectively be wasting more and more of the computing resources available to us as time goes by.

An emerging technology that has the potential to eliminate the present bandwidth bottleneck is the brain-computer interface (BCI). While BCIs are typically thought of as an assistive technology, they could also be used to supercharge the efficiency of those without physical disabilities. But before that can happen, the technology needs to be refined a great deal. At present, they do not work well enough for many people to consider having elective brain surgery for the system’s electrodes to be implanted.

As is usually the case in the tech world, the best way to make rapid advancements is through experimentation. When it comes to BCIs, that is not exactly easy for the weekend tinkerer — but YouTuber AstroSam appears to be on the right track. AstroSam has taken on the challenge of developing a DIY BCI development platform for testing out ideas. Granted, there is no way to actually implant the device in one’s brain and validate its function, but hey, you have to start somewhere.

AstroSam’s platform consists of custom, circular PCBs that are 20 mm in diameter. The PCBs can be stacked and electrically connected to one another via spring pins. This stack is designed to attach to the back of the skull, and a 3D-printed mounting bracket was developed for that purpose, although plastic would of course not be the right material to use if the BCI were actually mounted to the body.

The main board in the stack is equipped with a Microchip ATmega32U2 microcontroller. This chip handles all inputs, interfacing with accessories, reading BCI data, and USB communication. A custom cable with a magnetic attachment connects the processing board to an array of 32 electrodes that are meant to be wired to probes embedded in the brain. A set of four multiplexers feed these signals into the microcontroller’s GPIO pins for data readout.

While AstroSam’s work is a good start, there is still a long way to go. Without any way to actually install and test the device, there is no real feedback, which would make it very difficult to iterate and improve the design. How do you improve something if you do not know how well it works? The path forward is far from certain, but perhaps through experimentation future tinkerers will find a way to collect high-resolution data in a non-invasive manner.