Welcome to the assembly guide for the “Community Edition” of Puzzlebox Telekinesis. By following these instructions you should be able to build your own EEG headset using simple, common tools with only 10-15 minutes of effort. Once finished you’ll be ready to install software and begin Motor Imagery training for steering Brain-Computer Interface control of games, software, and other Puzzlebox products and projects.
1. Check the following parts are available:
Hardware
- OpenBCI 32-bit Board Kit (8-channel or 16 channel)
- OpenBCI USB adapter
- OpenBCI battery pack
- Header pin / touch proof electrode adapters
- Florida Research Instruments electrodes
- 18-inch lead wires (5+)
- Disposable / reusable dry electrodes (one per lead wire)
- Ag/AgCl ear clip electrodes (2)
- 18-inch lead wires (5+)
- Hard hat suspension replacement
- Adjustable boot straps (2+)
- 1.5″ – 2″ thick heavy stretch knit elastic (1’+)
- AA batteries (4)
- Intel Compute Stick
Tools (recommended)
- Cloth tape measure
- Craft hole-punch for cloth or leather
- Scissors suitable for cloth
- Needle nose pliers
- Phillips Screwdriver (micro)
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2. Begin by removing the ratchet suspension from the hard hat replacement headband. Often a brow comfort pad may be present which can also be optionally removed, depending on personal preference. |
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3. Next take the roll of thick heavy stretch knit elastic and cut one or more lengths of approximately 1 foot. |
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9. Each of the color-coded cable should be connected in sequence on the lower set of pins (indicated by the number “2” following the label name). Start with the white lead to SRB2 (EEG reference) and grey to N1P2 (EEG channel 1), through brown on N8P2 (EEG channel 8) and black on BIAS (ground).
The meaning of these pins is available in more detail through OpenBCI’s own online documentation. For example: “The BIAS pin is similar to the ground pin of common EEG systems, but it uses destructive interference waveform techniques to eliminate the ‘common mode noise’ of all of the active channels.” and: “The SRB2 pin is the default ‘reference pin’ for your OpenBCI input channels.” |
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12. Finally attach the OpenBCI USB adapter to your Intel Compute Stick for remote processing of the EEG data stream via WiFi, LAN, or Cloud-hosted systems such as OpenViBE or Cloudbrain.
Of course an Intel Compute Stick is not strictly necessary if you wish to use a full-fledged Linux or Windows-based PC directly, but we find the hardware to be suitable for a minimum-viable, low-cost platform for collecting and sending the data upstream. Jérémy Frey in particular has published an excellent guide getting started using your OpenBCI-based “Community Edition” version of Telekinesis with OpenVibe. The signal acquisition server is the only component which needs to run on the Intel Compute Stick: |
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