Let a thousand neurons fire

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!

Posted: 2010-Jul-30 — Filed under: Education, Marketing, Outreach

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

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!

Posted: 2010-Jul-19 — Filed under: Hardware, Marketing — Tags: DIY MAKE neuroscience

How to Roll Your Own iPhone Data Recording Cable

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…

Posted: 2010-Jul-12 — Filed under: Hardware, Marketing

SpikerBox rejected by Computer History Museum

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.

Posted: 2010-Apr-12 — Filed under: Hardware, Marketing

ByB visits MAKE magazine, Exploratorium

Backyard Brains just returned from a packed trip to the Bay Area, where, among other things, the highlights included meeting the folks at MAKE Magazine. The night before our morning meeting, we were up late in the hotel making sure everything worked.

Thankfully, everything was fully operational battle station, and we spent a good two and a half hours at the editorial offices, doing demos for the staff. Dale Dougherty, the editor and publisher, got to hear his first neuron!

We also browsed their workshop and saw some of the gear that may be familiar to readers of MAKE.

During the weekend, Tim went to the California Academy of Sciences in Golden Gate Park and finally saw some Giant Cockroaches. Oddly, they look simply like giant versions of the Discoid Cockroaches that Backyard Brains uses.

On the last day of the trip, ByB also visited the Exploratorium and had a great chat with Charlie Carlson, senior Biologist. He told us the Exploratorium used to do neurophysiology in the 70’s, but phased it out for new exhibits. Tim and Greg were disheartened, but Charlie explained that he’d love to bring it back, and the introduction of inexpensive, easy-to-use neuroscience (they were using $1000 rigs even in the 70’s) is right in line with the Exploratorium’s mission. To the beginning of a beautiful friendship…

Posted: 2010-Mar-15 — Filed under: Education, Marketing

A Michigan Life Preserver? Backyard Brains and Ann Arbor featured on PBS

As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” vs. “read states”, and they have identified 12 types of places across the US, including: Evangelical Epicenters, Empty Nests, Boom Towns, etc.

Each of the 12 region types were highlighted by choosing a city and focusing attention on some aspect of life there. Ann Arbor was chosen as the quintessential “Campus and Careers” city, so PBS focused on how Ann Arbor is surviving in a turbulent Michigan economy. Backyard Brains does make a brief cameo in the beginning. Enjoy!

Posted: 2009-Dec-9 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing — Tags: Demo, Media, PBS, Television

ByB has First Sale, First Field Test!

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of  delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his best one yet!

But, a professor in Minnesota wanted one for a “teaching biology” course she was running this past weekend, so it was delivery by then or wait till next Spring! ByB got it out just in time, and we have our fingers crossed for the feedback!

Now on to getting those PCB’s completed….

Posted: 2009-Nov-9 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing

ByB Founders Published auf Deutsche!

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer recently translated these works in German and published them in a book packed with tongue-in-cheek articles on neuroscience. Contribute to the Backyard Brains R&D fund! You can purchase the book here. A small bit of royalties go to us, and this will pour right into ByB, and ultimately straight back to you, fellow SpikerFriends!

Posted: 2009-Oct-30 — Filed under: Biz, Marketing

ByB brings Spikes to the Society for Neuroscience

Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in 1971 to do actual recordings at the conference! We brought a veritable lab to our exhibit.

And quite the crowd came to see Greg demonstrate our prototypes

And, via our newest collaborator and colleague Alex Wiltschko, we officially announced a new iPhone app for recording spikes! Now you don’t even need a computer to do your neuroscience. See Greg showing it off below..

The official Spanish speaking liaison of Backyard Brains, Mrs. Jennifer Trigger Marzullo, talked about the SpikerBox to some of our fellow Neuroscientists from Mexico and Argentina. “¡Lo hacemos en el garaje!”

Backyard Brains was also proud to announce its first sale! Gina Poe, faculty member at the University of Michigan and a thesis committee member from Tim’s PhD dissertation, gave us a down payment on the first SpikerBox. Thanks Gina! We’re on it!

Of course, with so many of our hero neuroscientists present, Backyard Brains recruited hard. We tried unsuccessfully to convince George Paxinos, author of famed Rat Atlas in Sterotaxic Coordinates, to make a new book on the cockroach. He was kind enough, though, to let us take a picture with him.

And, to Tim’s delight, ByB ran into Eberhard Fetz. One could quite easily argue Tim’s whole PhD Dissertation was based on work done by Professor Fetz. Operant Conditioning of Unit Activity? Done in 1969, better than you. Investigation of LFPs and spikes in Motor Cortex? Done in 1996, better than you. Simultaneous Recording and Stimulation for Closed-Loop Control? Done in 2008, better than you. Even Backyard Brain’s new use of a smartphone as a data acquisition device? Done in 2006, better than you.

But, with a huge smile and a sigh of relief on our parts, Professor Fetz liked the SpikerBox and iPhone app and gave us a thumbs up. Keep us sharp Eb!

Now back to work and getting to production!

Posted: 2009-Oct-22 — Filed under: Education, Marketing

ByB Interviewed by Ray Suarez

Ray Suarez, of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, recently interviewed ByB for a TV feature on entrepreneurship, focusing on various towns in U.S. Hopefully we’ll make the cut for the show in December! Ray was a friendly fellow, asking a lot of questions about the neural signals, synapses, and cockroaches. In good humor, he posed with our humble friends (see his shoulder).

Posted: 2009-Oct-6 — Filed under: Marketing