what_is_the_mdt.txt ยท Last modified: 2014/05/06 19:55 (external edit)

Developer Tools

The Developer Tools are the set of software tools and APIs for NeuroSky Headset (MindSet and MindWave) that make it easy for developers to create innovative applications that interact with the user's mental state. The MDT includes the following separate, independent APIs and interfaces:

  • The ThinkGear Connector (TGC) program, which runs in the background of your Windows or Mac OSX system, managing connections to MindSet headsets, and streaming the data to standard TCP/IP sockets that can be read by the applications you write (which can be in any language and on any system).
  • The ThinkGear Communications Driver (TGCD), a shared library of functions with an easy-to-use but well-documented API which facilitate the tasks of connecting to headsets and parsing the data streams. By calling the TGCD functions in the TGCD, your application simply has to call one function to Connect(), and then repeatedly call functions to ReadPackets() and GetValue() to get data from any MindSet. The TGCD is available as a .dll for Windows and Windows Mobile systems, and a .bundle for Mac OSX systems, which can be called directly from C/C++ code. It includes Java (JNI) and C# wrappers to easily call the library functions from those languages. Lastly, there is a version of the TGCD for J2ME platforms. A version of it will soon be available for iPhone as well.
  • Detailed low-level specifications of the MindSet's serial data stream, known as the MindSet Communication Protocol, and a little Stream Parser Library which facilitates the parsing and interpreting of the data stream (provided as ANSI C source code for easy portability). By following the specs and the Stream Parser Library, virtually any platform that can read serial data from a Bluetooth connection, from scripting languages all the way down to microprocessors, can obtain brainwave data from MindSet headsets.

To learn more about these APIs and interfaces, please see the Which API is right for me page.

The Developer Tools are available as a FREE DOWNLOAD from the NeuroSky Store.