Backyard Brains Competition

We are but poor engineers and scientists. Just ask our colleagues and advisers. Thus, we are open-source. We turn to you, the collective mass of smarter, prettier, and stronger people to help us design a better SpikerBox. We hereby announce the:

Penaeidae Prize: Make Signal, Not Noise

Our desire is to increase our “C.G.E.” Quotient, or “cheap, good, easy.”

whereby Price = Total Price of Your Components (Cheap)
whereby SNR = Signal to Noise of Your Circuit (Good)
whereby #components = Total number of Components in your circuit (Easy)

C.G.E. is a number summarizing the cost (“Cheap” - price should get lower), the signal to noise ratio (“Good” - SNR should get higher), and number of discrete components (“Easy” - # components should get lower). The 15, 10, and 5 numbers are co-efficients; you can see we value cost and SNR more than total number of components. Our current cost of raw materials in $19, our current SNR is 5, and our current number of components is 25.

We will test each design on the same preparation, so that way everything will be fair and square. The deadline for the competition is May 15th, 2011. Who can apply? Anyone from school groups, to retired IBM engineers, to tenured Neural Engineering Professors.

Give your design a proper name, and send a working prototype to us to test with the others. Also, please send in an eagle cad file (preferred), or a hand-drawn circuit diagram on a napkin to: contest@backyardbrains.com

And we’ll announce the winner this summer! The submitter with the highest C.G.E. will have their name (or school group) stenciled on the new SpikerBox board runs, and the design will be showcased at the Society for Neuroscience 2011 Meeting in Washington, D.C., with its own abstract and poster. If we have enough funding we will sponsor the winner to come to D.C. and present the data themselves. (Please, please let the winner be from D.C.)

We recommend buying a DIY kit [$50] from us to get you started. You don’t necessarily need one though. We barely make any money on those kits anyway. If you are an electronics head (Hi Shane), and you have all the components yourself in your home lab, here is the eagle cad file of the SpikerBox.