Strategy

• Design of a wireless system for recording the neural activity of a freely moving rat
• Design and implementation of compression algorithm, ADCPM, for the optimization of the bandwidth usage among the wireless neural signal acquisition systems

Management

• Design and management of a workspace for the development of microelectronics systems
• Selection of the tools and components for the development of based-microcontroller systems
• Evaluation of the project costs, within the context of open source development, fast reproducible systems
• The purpose is to offer a non-expensive replacement of industrial existing systems

Implementation

The initial part of the project was to select the appropriate Microcontroller and wireless transceiver that would reach our specifications. Thus we tests multiple wireless systems: Bluetooth, WIFI, ZigBee, analog RF, Nordic Custom; and microcontroller: Arduino, Mbed, STMicroelectronics, TI. We select the Nordic nrf24L01+ for the wireless part and a STM32F0 for the computing/peripheral unit. We then created our first proto-board, then the PCB. The following was to debug both the hardware of our 3 stages board and its firmware. After a long series of test regarding the bandwidth, transmission loss and battery life, we were ready to test it on living rodents. Once the real data were acquired, we worked on the journal article writing to finally end the project.