BCI2000Tools 1.2.0

A suite of Python tools for working with BCI2000 data files, processing chains, and live sessions

This toolbox is part of BCI2000, a platform for real-time biosignal acquisition, analysis and feedback for brain-computer interfacing and related neurotechnologies. These files provide a mixed collection of tools for reading BCI2000 .dat files, for performing simple analyses of biosignal data, and for interacting with a running BCI2000 session.

BCI2000Tools’ relationship with your BCI2000 distribution

Some of BCI2000Tools’ functionality (reading .dat files, rudimentary signal analysis, computing spatial filters, plotting, …) is self-contained. For this reason, we decided to release BCI2000Tools as a self-contained package on PyPI, to take its place in the Python-centric ecosystem.

By contrast, some of the toolbox’s functionality relies on BCI2000 binaries that are not included in the PyPI release: for example, the BCI2000Tools.Chain submodule is designed as a Python wrapper around the C++-compiled binaries found in the tools/cmdline subdirectory of a full BCI2000 distribution; BCI2000Tools.Remote is a wrapper around BCI2000’s prog/BCI2000Remote.py, which in turn wraps a dynamic library from, and sends messages to the binaries in, the prog directory. For this reason, the canonical way to install and manage BCI2000Tools is not via PyPI at all, but via the bci2000.org subversion repository:

# (1) register for a free username on bci2000.org;
# (2) install an svn client; then:
svn checkout https://bci2000.org/svn/trunk  bci2000-svn
cd bci2000-svn/tools/python  # BCI2000Tools and its setup.py both live here
python -m pip install -e .   # install in-place ("editable")

and if you do it that way, and leave BCI2000Tools in that location, BCI2000Tools will automatically find the corresponding tools/cmdline/* and prog/* elements (provided you have built them).

If you install another way (e.g. from PyPI via a standard non-editable install, python -m pip install BCI2000Tools), you would need to specify the root directory of your BCI2000 distribution explicitly—certainly before you import BCI2000Tools.Remote and ideally also before you import BCI2000Tools.Chain. Here is how to do that:

from BCI2000Tools import bci2000root
bci2000root('/PATH/TO/BCI2000/DISTRO/WITH/BINARIES')

from BCI2000Tools.Remote import BCI2000
from BCI2000Tools.Chain import bci2000chain

If you do from BCI2000Tools.AllTools import * Python will attempt to import all the submodules, and you will see a message telling you which imports did and did not succeed, along with any reasons for failure.