Backyard Brains

How to Troubleshoot Noise! on your SpikerBox

Tim — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 02:21:00 +0000

Blast you noise! Where do you come from! What do you want! Leave me alone! Sadly, to the neuroscientist, and indeed every scientist, noise is just a part of the natural world. But, since it is of the natural world, you can try to understand it, perhaps even reduce its effect on the phenomena you are studying. Backyard Brains hereby brings a high-production video straight from our lab in the North Suburbs of Ann Arbor. You’ll probably find our suggestions only kinda work for you. Welcome to Neuroscience!

Yes, Virginia, cockroach legs do grow back.

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:39:07 +0000

Many people have asked us if the cockroach legs we cut off and use for our experiments grow back on the respective owners. That and “the cockroach leg is still alive when removed from the body?” are the two most common questions we get, from 5 year olds up to 80 year olds.

After a cockroach donates 1-2 of its legs to science, he/she retired to the shady acres retirement home, where it spends the rest of its cockroach life living in dirt, making babies, and eating organic lettuce and carrots. When cleaning the terrarium, we often check to see if any of the legs have grown back.

Look what we discovered! The cockroach below went through two molts after his right rear leg was cut off. He just recently molted and we saw a little leg! The other leg (left rear) was cut in between the first and second molt. So, Yes, Virginia, they do grow back. Just takes two molts for the growing leg to appear. This cockroach is fine; he is back in his house eating lettuce.

Backyard Brains featured on Boing Boing, Boston Globe, and Nature.com

Tim — Wed, 04 Aug 2010 17:31:45 +0000

We have received a fair bit of press the past week related to some of the community events we have done. In June Tim spoke at the Humanity Plus Summit at Harvard on the “Rise of the Citizen Scientist.” The room was jam-packed with “trans-humanists” and Tim was interviewed for a Boston Globe piece on the open science movement.

At the recent MAKER faire in Detroit, editor-in-chief of MAKE Magazine, Mark Frauenfelder, selected us as his favorite Makers on Boing-Boing. Thanks Mark! See below for some budding neuroscientists.

Finally, we are collaborating with the Fund Science folks, to allow you, yes you, to contribute to research projects. Wonder when you do those 5K runs for cancer, where the money goes? Here you directly know. Donations to Backyard Brains would go towards paying educators to help develop our lab books and hiring coders to improve and update our iPhone/iPad educational software. A recent article in nature.com speaks about this funky new concept. Don’t worry, rest assured we at Backyard Brains are decidedly poor (not paying ourselves yet); you’re not donating to a company like AIG, which you already did, in a round-about way.

Let a thousand neurons fire

Tim — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 19:35:32 +0000

On July 20th and 21st, Backyard Brains ran part of the Health and Biomedical Engineering for Girls Camp, where, over the course of two days, 45 area high school girls learned about electronics and neuroscience. They built and soldered their own SpikerBoxes, and then used their new devices for their own neuroscience experiments. See below for a wonderful sight of brand new neuroscientists brought into existence! Watch out oh professors of the world, in 5-7 seven years you might be seeing some unusually talented graduate students.

If you are interested in Backyard Brains coming to your student group and teaching about neurons and electrical engineering, don’t hesitate to contact us!

Backyard Brains bringing spikes to Maker Faire Detroit this weekend.

Tim — Thu, 29 Jul 2010 16:20:19 +0000

Those of you in the Midwest, bring your families and friends to the Maker Faire at the Henry Ford Museum this weekend (July 31st and August 1st). Backyard Brains will be participating in this nerd paradise. Our exhibit number is 3534. Also, the “silent third” partner of Backyard Brains was recently highlighted by the University of Michigan School of Education for her work with the organization Michigan Future.

Now offering DIY “Bag of Parts” Kit for $49.99. Build your own Neuroscience.

Tim — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 16:07:30 +0000

Depending on what generation you are, you may fondly remember home-built AM radio kits. Backyard Brains is inspired by the amateur electronics heads of the 60’s and 70’s, and we now announce our SpikerBox “Bag of Parts” kit. You get the board, you get the chips, capacitors, and resistors, some instructions, and off you go! Here’s what it looks like when you are done.

And with the enclosure, which we also provide in the kit.

Here is a picture of our first customer who ordered the bag of parts version. Yes, Luis does have a MakerBot behind him. With such a 3D printer you can build your own enclosure. Unleash the output of your mind and hands, my fellow creatives!

How to Roll Your Own iPhone Data Recording Cable

Tim — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 20:37:59 +0000

Many users, while enjoying the SpikerBox demo’s we have done, have also expressed excited curiosity that the iPhone can be used as a portable data recorder / oscilloscope. To truly take advantage of your iPhone though, you want your signal to go directly to the line input. Though you can buy one of these cables, in the open-source spirit of Backyard Brains, here is the schematic to build your own. You need: one 4.7 kOhm resistor, one 10 uF capacitor, one 3.5 mm audio three conductor cable you cut in half, and one 3.5 mm audio four conductor cable you cut in half. Bring out your soldering iron, your wire-stripper, and your favorite beverage!

Wrap all exposed wire in electrical tape, cover with heat shrink tubing, and you’re ready to rock! This design splices the left and right audio channels in the microphone input, so if you use this cable to record music, you are only recording in mono.

This of course is our favorite use…

Backyard Brains iPhone Application Now Available. You can record your spikes in the field and on the go.

Tim — Thu, 20 May 2010 15:03:20 +0000

The SpikerBox allows you to amplify and listen to spikes in a cheap, portable, and easy way. Using the built-in headphone jack you can also record the spikes from your SpikerBox on a computer, but we all know modern laptops are way too bulky and are beginning to go out of style. What if you want to record and visualize your spikes, but only have your iPhone? Have no fear. You asked; we listened. The Backyard Brains iPhone Application is now available for download from the online App Store. What used to take a room full of equipment you can now fit in your hand. See some real recordings I made below from a cockroach; you don’t have to go to advanced college/graduate school to do this anymore!

Note: to go into the iPhone headphone jack, you need to modify a cable. It’s not too difficult; there needs to be 4.7 kOhm load in between the microphone and ground connections. You can also also order it from us if you don’t want to bust out your soldering iron and begin cutting cables.

Spikes on a Plane Revisited

Tim — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:24:04 +0000

In early March, Backyard Brains made history by doing the first neural recordings on a commercial airline flight. As professional scientists however, we know that experiments should be repeated before conclusions are made. On a flight from Chicago to Kansas City in late April, we again performed the experiment. Before that though, during our layover in Chicago, Greg was debugging some of our equipment at one of the laptop kiosks. I lost a bit of faith in the Homeland Security Department that day, as when we were actively soldering electronic components together at the airport, not one person even asked us what we were doing. Maybe it’s racial profiling, who knows.

Once we got on our plane to Kansas City and reached cruising altitude, we realized we needed to know what the pressure inside the cabin was, so we requested the steward to ask the captain. Here is a link to an audio recording of our inquiry:

Spikes On A Plane Altitude Request

We determined cabin pressure was at 7250 Aviator Units.

Unfortunately, the cockroach leg had begun to dry out, and the neural activity was very noisy. We were skeptical if it was real or not.

Doesn’t look like it. I (Tim) decided to try again on my return flight from Kansas City to Chicago, but I became a victim of my own brazenness. I literally walked through the security with the cockroaches in a clearly visible container in an open cardboard box (rather than in a small box in a shirt pocket, as in the past), and this time they didn’t let me go through. After speaking with the customer liaisons at United Airlines for half an hour, they decided it was up to the pilot captain to make the final call whether to let the cockroaches on board or not. I made an imprassioned plea to the captain (offering an honorary Ph.D. in exchange for honorary wings). He was good-spirited about it, and said “in the name of science education,” he would let me keep my cockroaches, but he made me promise to not do “spikes on a plane” on his airship (he was worried about escaped cockroaches getting into the wiring on the plane, which evidently has happened before). The liaisons double taped up the container just to be sure…

In the future, we’ll have to put the leg on the SpikerBox BEFORE we get into the airport. But we thank the good folks at United and Delta airlines for being such good sports about the whole thing.

SpikerBox rejected by Computer History Museum

Tim — Mon, 12 Apr 2010 18:18:15 +0000

During Backyard Brains’ recent visit to California, one of our events was at the Computer History Museum. We are geeks at heart: Our heroes consist of the trilogy of Woz, Engelbart, and Roberts. Tim and Greg have gazed longingly at the core memory units, the signed Apple I, the memory drums, and all the other vintage artifacts in the wonderful museum. We dream of the day one of our inventions can have a place near the Altair and first Google Servers.

Thus, in a combination of humor and hubris (humbris?), Tim and Greg decided to donate their first SpikerBox board to the museum. We argued passionately to museum registrar Karen Kroslowitz that much as the computer revolution began with simple, homemade, and heartfelt electronics, we were attempting to do the same thing to the “neurorevolution,” and gee, wouldn’t the museum be honored to have our first board signed by us?

Sadly, wetware still is not in vogue at the museum, and we recently received our first board back. Ah well. They’ll come around.

Leaving the museum, Tim spied an old VW bus like his parents used to have in Germany in the 70’s. It’s not an El Camino but it will do. One day.