Upside Down Labs Opens Crowdfunding for Its Neuro PlayGround Lite Feather-Style EXG Sensor Board

New Delhi-based Upside Down Labs has opened crowdfunding for its Neuro PlayGround Lite, a Feather-format development board targeting electrocardiography (ECG), electromyography (EMG), electrooculography (EOG), and electroencephalography (EEG) human-machine interface projects.

Upside Down Labs unveiled the Neuro PlayGround Light back in April as a successor to its BioAMP EXG Pill, promising the same ECG, EMG, EOG, and EEG — grouped together as "EXG" — sensing in a Feather form factor powered by an Espressif ESP32-C6 microcontroller with single-band Wi-Fi, Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE), and IEEE 802.15.4 Thread- and Zigbee-compatible radio connectivity. An on-board three-channel amplifier handles the tiny electrical variances picked up by the stick-on probes, while there are a range of add-on boards, dubbed "Playmates," to offer vibration, buzzer, and even electrode haptic feedback.

Since its original announcement, Upside Down Labs has been working on putting together additional sample apps for the device: in addition to the browser-based heart monitor, blink-trigger for gaming, and a bubble-popping brain computer interface in which the player needs to maintain a focused state, the company has now detailed additional demos including the control of a remote-controlled car with muscle and brainwave signals over a Bluetooth Low Energy connection, mind control of home automation smart plugs, infrared signalling of other appliances, an app that combines EEG intent and EMG action confirmation for assistance in taking medication, a cardiac health monitor with ailment detection, multi-channel EMG gesture recognition, and an example of using single-channel EXG sensing for blink detection, focus, and jaw-clenching detection.

The company has also been polishing its supporting software, showing off a Rust-based graphical user interface for flashing new firmware to the Neuro PlayGround Lite board, a NextJS-based data visualisation, processing, and recording package called Chords-Web plus a stndalone Python version sensibly dubbed Chords-Python, a Rust-based connector for streaming data, and a data stream visualizer. There has, however, been a shift in the board's specifications: what was originally 8MB of flash memory has been dropped to 4MB on the final hardware revision.

Upside Down Labs has launched crowdfunding for the Neuro PlayGround Lite on Crowd Supply with rewards starting at $99 for the base "Explorer" version, $149 for the "Ninja" with additional electrodes and cables plus a bundled VibZ Playmate, battery, and 3D-printed case, and topping out at $199 for the "Beast" bundle that increases the channel count from three to six with a VibZ+ Playmate board. All hardware is expected to ship at the end of November, the company has said.