Closing the loop in a real-time BCI application

To close the loop in your BCI application, you have to communicate the control signal from the application/computer that does the feature extraction and feature translation to the application that is controlled by the BCI system. The application that is controlled by the BCI signal can be anything from a generic stimulus presentation software (e.g. NeuroBS Presentation, ERTS, ANT EEvoke, …) to a custom-built hardware device (e.g. robot arm).

Standard Matlab already includes functionality to read from and write to serial ports. This uses the instrfind and fopen functions.

The Psychtoolbox IOPort is a MEX file for precise control of input/output hardware, e.g., Serial ports (or emulated serial ports like Serial-over-USB etc.), parallel ports, network ports, and special digital I/O boxes.

The write_event function includes “serial://<port>?key1=value1&key2=value2&…” as a target stream.

HW VSP is a software driver that adds a virtual serial port (e.g. COM5) to the operating system and redirects the data from this port via a TCP/IP network to another hardware interface, which is specified by its IP address and port number. Alternative products are listed here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/COM_port_redirector.

The Mathworks Data Acquisition toolbox supports reading and writing to a parallel port through the digitalio function.

The Psychtoolbox IOPort is a MEX file for precise control of input/output hardware, e.g., Serial ports (or emulated serial ports like Serial-over-USB etc.), parallel ports, network ports, and special digital I/O boxes.

VNC and derivatives use the Remote Frame Buffer (RFB) protocol for communication. More details and the full specification can be found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RFB.

The write_event function includes “rfb://<password>@<host>:<port>” as a target communication stream.

Communication over TCP or UDP is possible using the TCP_UDP_IP toolbox.