OpenBCI Ganglion (Windows 10) – Part 5 – EEG Reading

For reference see: OpenBCI Ganglion Getting Started Tutorial

Reading Your Brainwaves

Once you’ve attached your electrodes, and turned on your Ganglion.

Once the Ganglion is connected to your computer (see previous instructions), it is time to take your first EEG reading.

Start your OpenBCI program:

In the top left-hand corner (next to the “Start Data Stream”) is a “Notch 60 Hz” button.  If you are in North America, keep the Notch 60 Hz as is. If, on the other hand, you are in most of the rest of the world click on that button to change to “Notch 50 Hz”.  Note, EEG machines are so sensitive that they pick up electrical signals from the alternating current (AC)  electricity running in the walls of most buildings (see Mains Electricity). So as to display the EEG readings without the “line noise” from the walls, Notch filters are usually used in EEG software. In the case of the OpenBCI_GUI software, the Notch 60 Hz and Notch 50 Hz filters are for display purposes only, the saved readings are not filtered.

Then click on the green button “Start Data Stream”:

Run for a few minutes, then click on “Stop Data Stream”, and close the OpenBCI_GUI program.

Now, go back to your OpenBCI folder, And double-click on the “SavedData” folder:

Where you will find your EEG reading, in this case:

OpenBCI-RAW-2017-04-09_13-34-39.txt

When you open it up your EEG reading in Notepad, this is about what you’ll see:

Close up the file, and load it back into the OpenBCI_GUI software to view and play around with.

Do this by opening up the OpenBCI_GUI software, then click on “PLAYBACK(from file)”, then click on “SELECT PLAYBACK FILE”, choose your EEG reading, or you can playback this sample file:

Click on “Start Data Stream”, and viola! Now you can play around with the different settings and views etc available on the OpenBCI_GUI.

A great thing about the OpenBCI_GUI software is that it saves the Test Subject’s EEG readings to a file, for later analysis and to share with others.

Here’s a well done youtube video OpenBCI GUI Demo

All done, congratulations!

Also see the OpenBCI Page