From the lab
Blog
Notes from the ProtoCentral team — open hardware, biosignals, application notes, and lessons from the workbench.
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 set as a custom MCUmgr management group instead — about…
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…