ProtoCentral builds open-source biomedical hardware.
We design, manufacture, and ship sensor breakouts, vital-signs platforms, and reference designs for the people pushing what’s possible with physiological measurement — researchers, hardware startups, clinicians-in-training, and serious makers.
What we do
Our catalogue spans three layers of the stack:
- Sensor breakouts — ECG, PPG, SpO2, bio-impedance, EDA, body temperature, and capacitive sensing front-ends, ready to wire into your Arduino, ESP32, or Raspberry Pi project.
- Vital-signs platforms — the HealthyPi family, including the HealthyPi 5 HAT for Raspberry Pi and the HealthyPi Move wearable, give you a working multi-parameter monitor out of the box and a hackable platform to build on.
- Reference designs — every product ships with schematics, board files, firmware, and documentation, so you can study what we did, change it, and take it into your own work.
Our story
ProtoCentral was founded by Ashwin Whitchurch out of a frustration familiar to anyone who has tried to prototype medical or biosignal electronics: the building blocks were either locked up inside expensive proprietary modules, or buried in datasheets with no working examples. We started by publishing the boards we wished we’d had, and we’ve kept doing that — one open-source design at a time — for over a decade.
Open source is the default, not a feature
Our hardware is published under the CERN-OHL-P v2 permissive licence; our firmware and software are MIT-licensed. You can find every ProtoCentral-original design in our public GitHub repos, including schematics, PCB files, and reference firmware.
We follow the Open Source Hardware Association definition:
“Open source hardware is hardware whose design is made publicly available so that anyone can study, modify, distribute, make, and sell the design or hardware based on that design. The hardware’s source, the design from which it is made, is available in the preferred format for making modifications to it.”
Why buy from ProtoCentral?
- Genuine, top-quality components and well-documented designs — we test every board before it leaves us.
- Real technical support from the same engineers who designed the boards.
- Documentation, schematics, and example code that actually let you get started the same day.
- We ship worldwide from Bangalore, India.
The OSHWA talk
ProtoCentral’s founder Ashwin Whitchurch spoke at the Open Source Hardware Summit (OSHWA) about why open source matters in medical instrumentation, and how working in the open has helped a small team in India tackle problems usually left to much larger companies.
Documentation, community, and support
- Read the docs at docs.protocentral.com and healthypi.protocentral.com.
- Browse and fork our hardware on GitHub: github.com/protocentral.
- Found a bug, want a feature, or have a question? Open an issue or discussion on the relevant repo, or get in touch.
Where we’re based
ProtoCentral Electronics is headquartered in Bangalore, India, and ships to customers across the US, Europe, India, and the rest of the world.