From the lab
Blog
Notes from the ProtoCentral team — open hardware, biosignals, application notes, and lessons from the workbench.
What Can You Build With the FDC2214? 12 Applications, and Where It’s the Wrong Chip
The FDC2214 doesn't measure capacitance directly — it measures the resonant frequency of an LC tank, and that one design choice decides what it's good at. Here are twelve things you can…
We Stopped Inventing Sync Protocols: Building a Custom MCUmgr Group in Zephyr
Our watch moved health data over a hand-rolled BLE service with its own framing. We deleted it and implemented the same feature…
HealthyPi Move NEXT: Same Device, New Everything
HealthyPi Move NEXT is mostly a free over-the-air update to every Move ever shipped — a health-data layer rebuilt on MCUmgr, epoch…
FDC1004 vs FDC2214: Choosing the Right ProtoCentral Capacitance Sensor Breakout
Two ProtoCentral 4-channel capacitance breakouts, two very different measurement methods. How TI's charge-based FDC1004 and LC-resonant FDC2214 differ — and which one…
Capacitive Sensing Applications: From Liquid Level Detection to Smart IoT Interfaces
Explore the most common real-world applications of capacitive sensing — from non-contact liquid level measurement and proximity detection to industrial IoT —…
Open Source Patient Monitors: What They Are, Why They Matter, and How to Build One
A practical guide to open source vital signs monitoring — what open source hardware means for medical instrumentation, why researchers and educators…
ProtoCentral vs. Commercial Biosignal Systems: An Honest Spec Comparison
A transparent, spec-driven comparison of ProtoCentral's open source biosignal hardware against Biopac, ADInstruments, Delsys, OpenBCI, and other commercial systems. No marketing spin…