Ganglion Getting Started Guide

Overview

This guide will walk you through setting up your Ganglion, connecting it to your computer, and then connecting it to yourself. Please review this guide in its entirety before starting, and consult the Ganglion Biosensing Tutorial Video. Have fun!

What You Need

1. OpenBCI Ganglion Board

   The Ganglion is OpenBCI's 4-channel bioamplifier — a low-cost biosensing board you can use to measure EEG, EMG, or ECG signals with electrodes. For full specs (power input, switches, pinout, schematics), see the OpenBCI Ganglion Hardware Doc.

   

2. OpenBCI Ganglion Dongle

   Required on macOS, Windows, and Linux. The Ganglion will pair via Bluetooth with this USB adapter.

3. Lithium battery and USB charger

   Using an older Ganglion? (pre-2023 units)

   Earlier kits shipped with a 6V battery pack that takes 4 AA batteries (not included) instead of a lithium battery and charger. If you have one of these, install 4 fresh AA batteries and skip the battery-charging step below — everything else in this guide works the same way.

4. Board Case

   The clear case snaps around the Ganglion board to protect it while keeping the power switch, battery connector, and electrode inputs accessible.

5. EEG electrodes: OpenBCI Gold Cup Electrodes, or your own electrodes, and Electrode Paste

   If you ordered OpenBCI Gold Cup Electrodes and Electrode Paste, it should come with:

   • 10 passive, gold cup electrodes on a color-coded ribbon cable
   • Jar of Ten20 conductive electrode paste

   If you plan to work with your own electrode cap or electrodes, the Touch-Proof Adapter will come in handy: it converts any touch-proof style electrode into one that can be plugged into an OpenBCI board.

6. Or EMG/ECG electrodes: disposable solid gel snap electrodes that snap onto Snap Electrode Cables, which can be plugged directly into the Ganglion's pin headers.

7. A computer with the OpenBCI GUI installed and with an available USB port for the dongle.

   Don't have the GUI installed yet? Follow the step-by-step guide to install the OpenBCI_GUI as a standalone application before continuing.

Setting Up Your Hardware

1. Charge your battery

   Fully charge the Lithium Polymer Battery, until the charger's indicator LED turns green. To do this, insert the battery's white plug into the matching slot on the USB charger, and connect the charger into a USB port.

2. Place the battery and the case

   Plug the charged battery into the 2-pin JST connector on the underside of your Ganglion board.

   Important note: If you are using a non-OpenBCI battery holder (not recommended), please check the polarity (red +/black -) BEFORE powering up your OpenBCI board. A reversed polarity will burn out your board.

   Place the board and battery into the bottom half of the clear case, taking care to position the battery in its compartment so its lead isn't pinched. Then align the board so the switches face the case's cutout, and press the two halves together until they click into place.

3. Attach your electrodes

   For EEG electrodes, when plugging female header pins onto the OpenBCI board, orient the sides with the 'silver latch bit' face-up since that side is a tiny bit wider than 0.1".

   For EMG/ECG electrodes, plug the snap cables directly into the Ganglion's pin headers, then snap the foam electrodes onto the other end of each cable.

   See the Connect yourself to OpenBCI section below for guides on where to place electrodes on the body and how to set up your reference electrodes for different biosensing setups.

4. Plug in the Ganglion Dongle

   Plug the OpenBCI Ganglion Dongle into your computer before launching the GUI.

5. Power on your Ganglion

   Turn on the power switch. You should see the BLUE LED blink gently. Blinking means that the BLE radio is not connected or paired with any computer or phone/tablet. Once the Ganglion is connected, the LED stays steady on.

Start Using The OpenBCI GUI

Open the OpenBCI GUI now that your hardware is set up.

Connect the GUI to your Ganglion board

Select GANGLION (live) from the first drop down.

Select Bluetooth (BLED112 Dongle) as the transfer protocol.

The GUI will automatically start searching for Ganglion devices.

Each Ganglion has its own unique 4 character ID (in HEX), and you will see it listed in the BLE DEVICES window. If you don't see any Ganglions, check to make sure your Ganglion has a battery connected, is switched on, and the blue LED is blinking. If there are multiple Ganglions in the room, you can find yours by turning it off, clicking the REFRESH LIST button, then turning it back on. Make a note of your Ganglion's 4 character ID.

Select the desired Ganglion device from the dropdown list.

In the SESSION DATA panel, Name indicates the name of that session's subfolder — it's auto-generated, but you can rename it or click GENERATE SESSION NAME for a new one — and you can choose the file format (OpenBCI or BDF+). Under BRAINFLOW STREAMER, Location lets you change where that folder is saved: leave it on the default option to use [USER]/Documents/OpenBCI_GUI/Recordings, or select Custom to open a folder picker and choose your own destination.

Press START SYSTEM when you're ready to begin streaming.

If you're having trouble finding your Ganglion or getting it to start streaming, see the Troubleshooting Connection Issues section below.

Navigating the GUI

When the GUI connects, it opens up to the default window layout, shown below.

For a more in-depth guide to the GUI interface and functionality, and the different built-in widgets, check out the OpenBCI GUI Widget Guide. Refer to the Ganglion Data Format guide to learn how to interpret the raw data directly from the device. However this is already handled gracefully by BrainFlow for a number of programming languages and use cases.

For the purposes of this introductory tutorial, you should follow the following steps to setup the GUI.

Click on the Layout dropdown menu in the top-right corner, and select the one outlined in orange.

By default, this layout shows the Time Series widget on the left (for all 4 channels), displaying the incoming data in real time; and on the right, FFT Plot on top, showing the power level of the signals at different frequencies, and Accelerometer on the bottom, displaying the accelerometer data in real time. You can swap any of these for other widgets as you like.

Click Start Data Stream, in the top-left corner, to stream data from your Ganglion board.

You should see the Time Series widget go from a flat line at 0 to plotting your live data across all 4 channels.

You can also touch your input pin header and see this reflected as noise in the channels.

Now let's check out another sensor built into the board: the onboard three-axis accelerometer, which measures the acceleration of the board itself on the XYZ axis.

If the accelerometer is off, click the Turn Accel. On button to activate it (or Turn Accel. Off to deactivate it).

Pick up your board, and move it around. You should see this reflected in the Accelerometer widget. Nice!

Now that you've got your computer connected to the Ganglion, it's time to connect yourself!

Connect yourself to OpenBCI

To learn how to connect yourself to OpenBCI using your newly set up board, see the following tutorials:

• EEG Setup
• EMG Setup
• ECG Setup
• Multiple ExG Signals Setup

Troubleshooting Connection Issues

If you're having connection issues, try the following:

• make sure your battery is fully charged (or its AA cells are fresh, for legacy 6V packs)
• move the Ganglion board closer to its dongle
• turn the Ganglion off, hit 'REFRESH LIST' a couple of times, then turn it back on
• exit the GUI and restart the computer to reboot your USB port
• on macOS 11+, see the macOS BLE Workaround if the stream won't start or keeps dropping