Dareplane is a modular and broad technology agnostic open source software platform for brain-computer interface research. LSL is used for data communication and TCP sockets for module communication. The platform is designed to be minimalistic and to allow for easy development of custom modules, with minimal overhead of integrating existing code.
Have a look at the [documentation page](https://bsdlab.github.io/Dareplane/main.html) for some examples of how to get started.
Note: The docs are currently being reworked and extended. The coverage will improve in the up-coming months (as of 2025-06).
The platform and first performance evaluations are published in Dold et al., 2025, J. Neural Eng. 22 026029
Important: The platform is in an early stage and is developed by a small group of developers. Although core functionality is implemented and the platform has been used in >50 experimental sessions including simultaneous recording of EEG, ECoG, LFP and other signal modalities, please be aware that bugs still might occur and thorough testing is required.
The target users are developers of experimental setups who require customized software components, or who just want to have full control over the functionality of data I/O, algorithmic processing, and/or on stimulation and feedback. For this user group, Dareplane aims to provide a minimalistic framework which allows to develop and integrate bespoke modules in a simple way. It is a mind-child of the https://suckless.org/ philosophy and tries to adapt it in a pragmatic manner with research in the focus.
If you are looking for a setup that is more or less ready to use out of the box, you will be better of using a more mature framework which is oriented towards more plug-and-play components. In any case it is good to have a look at the other frameworks section.
The design philosophy of Dareplane
The basic idea of the Dareplane platform is to provide a modular approach for software components used for research of neuro-technology. The design goals are:
- to provide reusable single purpose modules which can be integrated into a larger system;
- to be technology agnostic, so that modules can be used with different hardware and developed in different languages;
- to be minimalistic in terms of constraints and required overhead for integrating existing software into the platform.
The implications of these design goals are:
- A common channel of communication between modules is required, which should work with a wide range of hardware and software. For Dareplane this is solved by using TCP sockets for module communication. For data transfer, the awesome LSL framework is used.
- A common protocol for communication is required, which Dareplane implements as string communication using what is referred to as primary commands. This is an arbitray string following by a pipe delimiter and potentially a
jsonpayload. Imagine a module for recording EEG data from a single data source. On a high level, a command you would want to use is:STARTRECORDING|{"path":"./mydatafolder/", "file": "myrecoding.xdf"}.
Overview of the Dareplane projects and individual modules
| Link | Description |
|---|---|
| dp-strawmam-module | a strawman repository as starting point for developing your modules |
| dp-control-room | the central module which combines individual modules to a system |
| dp-lsl-recording | module for interacting with the LSL LabRecorder |
| dp-mockup-streamer | module for creating mock-up streams from files or generating random data |
| dp-copydraw | module to run the CopyDraw - Castano et al. 2019 paradigm |
| dp-multiband-regression | module to perform a multiband regression based on a multichannel data stream |
| dp-bollinger-control | a Bollinger Band control module |
| dp-ao-communicatio | a C++ module interacting with the Alpha Omega’s API |
| dp-arduino-stimulator | module to use an Arduino as a mock-up of a neuro-stimulator |
| dp-picoscope-streamer | module to stream data from a Picoscope to LSL |
| dp-passthrough | a simple passthrough Dareplane module for performance testing |
| dp-threshold-controller | a threshold control module with grace periods |
| dp-cortec-bic | module to interact with the API of the CorTec BrainInterchange |
| dp-cvep-speller | a c-VEP speller paradigm module |
| dp-stroop | A classical and modified version of the Stroop color word task. |
| dp-c-sdl2-example | Prototype of creating a paradigm application with SDL in pure C. |
For python modules / development
If you are building your modules in python, or using the existing python modules, the dareplane-utils python module will provide some core functionality which most modules will need.
pip install dareplane-utilsThe module provides basic functionality around TCP servers, logging, and collecting data from LSL streams.
Control Room module
The control room module is the central piece for composition of modules to a full setup. Modules you need in your experiment are added within a setup configuration file (see ./examples and the documentation in the control room)
Getting started
A good starting point is the c-VEP experiment, which contains a setup script that downloads and configures a cVEP speller, outlining how modules need to be configured for interaction.
Citation
If you use Dareplane in your work, please cite the following paper:
@article{Dold_2025,
doi = {10.1088/1741-2552/adbb20},
url = {https://dx.doi.org/10.1088/1741-2552/adbb20},
year = {2025},
month = {mar},
publisher = {IOP Publishing},
volume = {22},
number = {2},
pages = {026029},
author = {Dold, Matthias and Pereira, Joana and Sajonz, Bastian and Coenen, Volker A and Thielen, Jordy and Janssen, Marcus L F and Tangermann, Michael},
title = {Dareplane: a modular open-source software platform for BCI research with application in closed-loop deep brain stimulation},
journal = {Journal of Neural Engineering},
}Other frameworks
This is a non-exhaustive list of other frameworks which might be more suitable depending on your needs: