I have only ever seen it run on two, and Actiview uses USB ports as trigger inputs. Our lab would benefit, however, from using one computer to both run our experiment and obtain trigger-marked eeg data so that the extra computer is free to perform data analysis simultaneously.
Any help would be greatly appreciated.
Hello Nicolas,
What I did in my PhD project was to use two computers: one to run the Actiview and the BCI application, and the other one to exclussively process EEG signals. Computer 1 was connected to Computer 2 via the TCP\IP server provided by Actiview. Computer 2 received all the raw data, then it translated that information into a control command and finally returned that command to Computer 1 for manipulating the BCI application. As you can control of all the data transfer process, it is not necessary to make use of the trigger box. However, if you still want to save the raw data by BDF-files (as I also did) and use the trigger box to mark the EEG signals, you can do it! I employed Computer 1 to record raw signals for further analysis.
Making use of the TCP/IP server, you can set up all your BCI environment in one computer. I did it during the system evaluation process. You only have to use the TCP/IP server as a host. This is only convenient if your signal processing and your application do not consume a lot of computer resources. Otherwise, I recommend to keep a computer for EEG signal processing purposes.
I unknow what programming language you are using, but I designed a very essential software for a BIOSEMI system and process EEG signal online and offline. The available tools are very elementary but this can help you to set up your own BCI platform. The software was programmed in Python and it is available on my GitHub site at https://github.com/LuzAlondra/BrainComputerInterfaces/tree/master/MI-based_BCIsystem. This is not well documented yet, but you can contact if you have any question. It will be all my pleasure.
Hope this help
Best Wishes
Luz
Hi
Our lab just finished migrating to new, powerful computers that do not possess parallel ports. I have finally found a way to run our experiment and send triggers on a single computer. The method takes advantage of the fact that the actiview software can respond to keypresses, specifically the functions keys F1 to F9 inclusively. I use PsychoPy, and hence, python. Using the pywin32 library to make system calls, you can send keypress events to the actiview window and thus simulate someone actually pressing the function keys. Note that this will not work if your design needs more than 8 different types of triggers. Feel free to email me for more details on my implementation.
Hope this helps!
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