During Backyard Brains’ recent visit to California, one of our events was at the Computer History Museum. We are geeks at heart: Our heroes consist of the trilogy of Woz, Engelbart, and Roberts. Tim and Greg have gazed longingly at the core memory units, the signed Apple I, the memory drums, and all the other […]

Backyard Brains just returned from a packed trip to the Bay Area, where, among other things, the highlights included meeting the folks at MAKE Magazine. The night before our morning meeting, we were up late in the hotel making sure everything worked. Thankfully, everything was fully operational battle station, and we spent a good two and […]

As you know, Backyard Brains is a small start-up in the struggling state of Michigan. Last month, Ray Suarez and the crew from PBS came to highlight Ann Arbor, as one type of city in it’s Patchwork Nation project. The scope of this project is add granularity to gross segmentation of “blue states” […]

With elbow grease and many hours at his workshop then he would care to admit, Tim of ByB hunkered down and made a new SpikerBox by hand last week (as we finalize our production design), for an impending hard deadline of delivery by November 9th. Tim was sad to see this SpikerBox go..it was his […]

In a previous life, during our graduate work, Greg and Tim (along with co-conspirator Hirak Parikh), presented satirical neuroscience posters at the Society for Neuroscience conference. These eventually turned into papers in the Annals of Improbable Research (read about Stock Market Neurons and the Cingularity Apocalypse at your leisure), but our good friend Manfred Spitzer […]

Backyard Brains recently spent five days in Chicago for the Society for Neuroscience conference, which is the primo place to be to show off your latest discoveries on the workings of the mysterious brain. 30,000 people! and ByB is proud to say they were probably the first poster presenters since the annual meeting began in […]

Ray Suarez, of the News Hour with Jim Lehrer, recently interviewed ByB for a TV feature on entrepreneurship, focusing on various towns in U.S. Hopefully we’ll make the cut for the show in December! Ray was a friendly fellow, asking a lot of questions about the neural signals, synapses, and cockroaches. In good humor, he […]

ByB applied last week to the second stage of the Zell Institute Dare to Dream grant. This grant, should we get it, will give us some funds for our initial runs of SpikerBoxes (stay tuned…we are close to final production). The grant, run every school semester by the UM Ross Business School, has three stages, […]

Concentrate Media, an Ann Arbor business magazine, recently interviewed Greg about ByB. You can read the article here. Note: The opinions of Greg Gage do not represent the opinions of ByB. We acknowledge that insect brains and human brains are different. Brief Primer for the newbies -Insects don’t have mylein sheaths on their axons. -Insects don’t really have a […]

Tim spent the tail end of last week in Kansas City, MO. Here is the demo he made while visiting the Kauffman Foundation as a finalist. Tim is applying for the Kauffman Foundation Post-Doctoral Fellowship program. We here at ByB wish him the best of luck!

You spoke; we listened. Version 3 of the SpikerBox is complete and fully operational. New features include: built-in Speaker, Gain Control, rapid switching between audio and recording mode, and three standard outputs: BNC, mini-stereo, and RCA. We have a couple more improvements (smaller size, smaller batteries, etc) to make, but stayed tuned. We foresee Version […]

Backyard Brains was highlighted in June 2009 by the University of Michigan News Service for the University’s Center for Entrepreneurship. The video is provided below.