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Dev tools · alternatives · 2026

24 alternatives to EEGFrontier – A compact open-source EEG board using ADS1299

Hi HN, I built EEGFrontier, a compact open-source EEG acquisition board based on the ADS1299 and an RP2040. The goal was to design a low-cost board that works with dry electrodes while exposing the full EEG signal chain — no abstractions, no closed firmware. What surprised me most during this project were the practical issues that datasheets don’t really prepare you for: grounding (REF/BIAS), noise coupling from digital lines, routing constraints, and how small layout decisions drastically affect signal quality. The repository includes full KiCad files, firmware, a BOM with cost…

Below are 24 products that do a similar job, ranked by how close each is in meaning and then by launch-day votes.

  1. 1

    Hi HN, I recently shared this on r/BCI and wanted to see what the engineering community here thinks. A while back, I got frustrated with the state of accessible BCI hardware. Research gear was wildly unaffordable. So, I spent a ton of time designing a custom board, software and firmware to bridge that gap. I call it the Cerelog ESP-EEG. It is open-source (Firmware + Schematics), and I designed it specifically to fix the signal integrity issues found in most DIY hardware. I believe in sharing the work. You can find the Schematics, Firmware, and Software setup on the GitHub repo: GITHUB…

    Jan 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  2. 2AD

    Hey HN! We are the founders of atopile. We’re building a tool to describe electronics with code. Here is a quick demo: https://youtu.be/7-Q0XVpfW3Y Could you imagine the pain of building an entire software product using only assembly code? That’s about how we felt designing hardware. We don’t currently have good ways to describe what we need, reuse existing designs and compile that description down to a product. We started atopile to fix this. atopile is an open-source language and toolchain to describe circuits with code. The compiler is here:…

    2024 · its alternatives →

  3. 3

    Advanced open-source sleep tracking EEG mask and band.

    2017 · kickstarter.com · its alternatives →

  4. 4

    EEG

    2022 · crowdsupply.com · its alternatives →

  5. 5

    Hi HN, We just opened public access to Qwen3‑Coder‑480B‑A35B‑Instruct via a REST/SDK API. Why it might be interesting: - Fully open-source (Apache‑2.0): https://github.com/QwenLM/Qwen3-Coder - 480B params (35B active MoE), long context up to 1M tokens with YaRN - Matches Claude Sonnet/GPT‑4o on SWE-Bench Verified (81.6%) - Free tier: 100K tokens/month

    2023 · netmind.ai · its alternatives →

  6. 6AS

    I recently learned about some fascinating research done at MIT for potentially treating Alzheimer’s using light and sound stimulation at 40 hertz. Nothing has been proven yet, but it seemed compelling to me, especially given the safety and simplicity of the treatment (i.e., no drugs, no electrodes, just looking at light and hearing sounds). I wanted to try it myself, but was surprised how hard it was to find something free and easy to use to generate such pulses. Which is odd because I remember some freeware DOS program I tried back in the 90s which did all this kind of stuff (anyone know…

    2024 · alzheimersbuddy.com · its alternatives →

  7. 7BM

    We explore a project that streams and visualizes EEG data, using Kafkta, OpenTSDB, and Grafana

    2016 · svds.com · its alternatives →

  8. 8

    Decode sentences directly from non-invasive brain signals

    Jun 2026 · ai.meta.com · its alternatives →

  9. 9WM

    Try it out! https://glhf.chat/ Hey HN! We’ve been working for the past few months on a website to let you easily run (almost) any open-source LLM on autoscaling GPU clusters. It’s free for now while we figure out how to price it, but we expect to be cheaper than most GPU offerings since we can run the models multi-tenant. Unlike Together AI, Fireworks, etc, we’ll run any model that the open-source vLLM project supports: we don’t have a hardcoded list. If you want a specific model or finetune, you don’t have to ask us for it: you can just paste the Hugging Face link in and…

    2024 · glhf.chat · its alternatives →

  10. 10

    A turbo boost for circuit board design

    2016 · snapeda.com · its alternatives →

  11. 11

    Hey HN, Nir, Gal and Tomer here. We’re open-sourcing a set of extensions we’ve built on top of OpenTelemetry that provide visibility into LLM applications - whether it be prompts, vector DBs and more. Here’s the repo: https://github.com/traceloop/openllmetry. There’s already a decent number of tools for LLM observability, some open-source and some not. But what we found was missing for all of them is that they were closed-protocol by design, vendor-locking you to use their observability platform or their proprietary framework for running your LLMs. It’s still early in the…

    2023 · github.com · its alternatives →

  12. 12
    AWEAR▲97

    Discreet brainwave wearable for real-time mental insights

    May 2026 · aweartech.com · its alternatives →

  13. 13

    Develop and deploy mind-controlled devices and applications

    2021 · anthriq.com · its alternatives →

  14. 14

    A smart watch that detects brain health/performance.

    2014 · its alternatives →

  15. 15

    Hey HN, we're super excited to share something we've been working on: OpenLIT. After an engaging preview that some of you might recall, we are now proudly announcing our first stable release! *What's OpenLIT?* Simply put, OpenLIT is an open-source tool designed to make monitoring your Large Language Model (LLM) applications straightforward. It’s built on OpenTelemetry, aiming to reduce the complexities that come with observing the behavior and usage of your LLM stack. *Beyond Basic Text Generation:* OpenLIT isn’t restricted to just text and chatbot outputs. It now includes automatic…

    2024 · github.com · its alternatives →

  16. 16

    Posted before, but wanted to share if you want an open source alternative to OpenAI fine-tuning, give Unsloth a try! Phi 3.5 was just released, and is distilled from GPT4. Unsloth makes finetuning 2x faster, uses 70% less VRAM + has no accuracy degradations. We rewrite all backprop steps and reduce FLOPs and write everything in Triton (JIT low level CUDA). If you want to own the weights after fine-tuning, give Unsloth a spin! I have free Colabs and Kaggle notebooks as well at https://github.com/unslothai/unsloth

    2024 · colab.research.google.com · its alternatives →

  17. 17

    Download free symbols, PCB footprints, and 3D models for thousands of TE Connectivity components. The largest source of verified PCB libraries.

    2018 · snapeda.com · its alternatives →

  18. 18

    Made an ARM Thumb CPU from scratch in a digital circuit simulator for fun and decided to push the joke a little further and run real stuff on it, like a Web server, a Scheme interpreter, a MIDI player, and a VT100 emulator. This is basically a how-did-we-get-here blogpost, it's my second one of this kind, I'd love any feedback you might have.

    2022 · zdimension.fr · its alternatives →

  19. 19

    Hey guys, A couple weeks ago, I was in Shenzhen, China for a hackathon and on the first day, we all used the one-day PCB fabrication to make PCB badges to wear during the event. I decided to go a little crazy and make some cool 3D alchemical-cosmological badges. It's 3 PCB's stacked on-top of each other that's connected using testpoints on each board. The innerboard has a 10 cent CH32V003 MCU that powers the WS2812B neopixels on the outer rings using the testpoints and shines through using exposed soldermask. If you have any questions about how the design works, feel free to let me know!

    Aug 2026 · github.com · its alternatives →

  20. 20

    Hey HN, I built Pace, a Claude Connector that lets you connect all your wearables (Garmin, Polar, Whoop, 20+) with Claude. You connect your devices once and can analyze your data with Claude. No Dashboard needed, just in natural language. I already use it everyday, especially the visualization tool in Claude makes this really cool to use. Tools include: overview, sleep, training, activity, samples and trends. Tech Stack: Python (FastMCP), Google Cloud Run, Google Cloud SQL (PostgreSQL) and Firebase It is live and free to try (no Claude Pro/MAX Plan needed).. Would love feedback,…

    Apr 2026 · pacetraining.co · its alternatives →

  21. 21OS

    My Public Second Brain (https://brain.sspaeti.com) is built with the help of a wonderful tool called Quartz (https://brain.sspaeti.com/quartz-publish-obsidian-vault/). Obsidian (https://brain.sspaeti.com/obsidian/) has become my favorite for note-takers, given its flexible and linked structure that closely mirrors our natural way of thinking. With Quartz, I was able to seamlessly publish my Obsidian notes to a public vault, providing the groundwork for my Public Second Brain. The journey of making this possible involved some scripting as…

    2023 · its alternatives →

  22. 22

    TL;DR - My cofounder Collin and I built an AI version of Digi-Key to help PCB designers find and use parts, except with a way bigger catalog, modern refinement tools, and an AI that can actually read the damn datasheets for you. *The problem* Modern circuit board design is filled with absurdly tedious tasks, where one small mistake can brick a project and cost thousands. The worst (in our opinion) is reading datasheets, which eats up to 25% of the first part of any project: 1. First, you slog through catalogs to find viable parts, using search tools that are still stuck in the dark ages.…

    2025 · zenode.ai · its alternatives →

  23. 23

    affordable hi-throughput electrophysiology

    2015 · open-ephys.org · its alternatives →

  24. 24UA

    Hello hackernews, I am looking for feedback for Labophase.com which is a app that focuses on returning results from multiple ai models at the same time. I currently support: GPT4-Turbo, Claude-2, Google PaLM2, Llama2, Mistral, and OpenOrca. Working on supporting Gemini soonTM. I built it to solve a couple of personal pains I experienced. After reaching out to a couple of users in r/localllama, seems that people would have similar approach to address hallucination, availability, and comparing ai models. Initial feedback came in with some surprises that I'm hoping to get feedback from the…

    2023 · labophase.com · its alternatives →

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