pieeg-core 0.2.0

Native accelerator for PiEEG — drop in, go faster

PiEEG Core

Native accelerator for PiEEG-server. Compiled Rust replacements for hot paths.

⚠️ Early development · experimental · no warranties. This project is in early development — APIs, behavior, and packaging may change without notice. Research/hobbyist software provided as-is, without warranty of any kind, express or implied. Not a medical device. Not intended for clinical, diagnostic, or safety-critical use. Use at your own risk. See LICENSE for full terms.

What it accelerates

Component	What	Speedup
MultichannelFilter	Butterworth IIR bandpass (SOS cascade)	~1057x
HampelFilter	Per-channel spike rejection (median + MAD)	~15x
decode_channels	24-bit ADC → µV conversion	~9x

When installed, pieeg-server detects it and switches to the compiled implementations automatically. No config needed.

On the Raspberry Pi it additionally provides a native acquisition loop (NativeAcquisition) that owns the SPI/GPIO hardware directly — see Native acquisition.

Benchmark

Hot path	Python	pieeg-core	Speedup
MultichannelFilter (bandpass 1–40 Hz)	992 samples/s	1,048,658 samples/s	~1057×
HampelFilter (spike removal)	24,619 samples/s	358,361 samples/s	~15×
decode_channels (24-bit SPI → µV)	121,352 samples/s	1,134,301 samples/s	~9×

Native acquisition (Raspberry Pi)

Beyond the drop-in DSP accelerators, pieeg-core ships a hard-real-time acquisition loop that reads the ADS1299(s) directly. A dedicated OS thread owns the SPI buses and GPIO lines, polls DRDY, reads both ADC chips, decodes to microvolts and pushes frames into a lock-free single-producer/single-consumer queue — all with the GIL released. Acquisition timing is therefore fully decoupled from CPython's GIL and garbage collector.

This path is compiled only into the Linux/Raspberry Pi wheels (built with the hardware Cargo feature); it depends on spidev and gpio-cdev, so it is absent from the Windows/macOS wheels.

from pieeg_core import NativeAcquisition

acq = NativeAcquisition(
    num_channels=16,      # 8 (one ADS1299) or 16 (two, PiEEG-16)
    sample_rate=250,      # 250, 500, 1000, 2000 or 4000 SPS
    gpiochip="/dev/gpiochip4",
    spi_speed_hz=4_000_000,
    cs_pin=19,            # chip-select for ADC 2 (16-ch mode)
    drdy_pin=26,          # DRDY for ADC 1
    drdy2_pin=13,         # DRDY for ADC 2
    queue_capacity=0,     # 0 → auto (~4 s of headroom)
)

acq.start()               # opens hardware, configures the ADC(s), spawns the read thread
try:
    while True:
        # Drain up to max_frames buffered samples in FIFO order.
        for seq, timestamp, channels in acq.read_batch(max_frames=256):
            ...           # channels is a list of microvolts, len == num_channels

        if acq.dropped:   # samples lost to consumer back-pressure (ring overflow)
            ...           # counted, never silent
finally:
    acq.stop()            # signals the read thread and joins it

API

Member	Description
start()	Open the hardware, configure the ADC(s) and spawn the read thread.
read_batch(max_frames=256)	Drain up to max_frames buffered samples as a list of (seq, timestamp, [ch1..chN]) tuples in FIFO order. Releases the GIL.
stop()	Signal the read thread to stop and join it. Also runs on drop.
pending	Frames currently buffered and waiting to be read.
dropped	Frames dropped because the consumer fell behind (ring overflow).

The register-configuration sequence is a faithful port of pieeg_server's PiEEGHardware._configure_adc, with the CONFIG1 data rate parameterised so you can select 250–4000 SPS. Each frame carries a monotonically increasing sequence index internally, so any upstream sample loss is recorded rather than hidden.

The SPI/GPIO paths can only run on a Raspberry Pi with a PiEEG shield. The non-hardware logic (queue, decode, register mapping) is unit-tested off-device.

Install

pip install pieeg-core

Pre-built wheels are published for Linux (x86_64, aarch64, armv7 — including Raspberry Pi), Windows (x86_64) and macOS (arm64) on CPython 3.10–3.13.

Build from source

Requires Rust and maturin:

pip install maturin
cd PiEEG-core
maturin develop --release

To include the native acquisition loop (Raspberry Pi only), enable the hardware feature:

maturin develop --release --features hardware

Build inside the same Python environment where pieeg-server is installed.