# Overview
The TOBI project defines a standardized interface called TiA (TOBI interface
A) to transmit raw biosignals, supporting multi rate and block-oriented
transmission of different kinds of signals from various acquisition devices
(e.g., EEG, EOG, near-infrared spectroscopy signals, etc.) at the same time
[1].

Interoperability between on streams provided with the TiA and the FieldTrip
buffer is provided with tia2ft. Tia2ft can connect to a TiA server, and serve
the incoming data through a FieldTrip buffer, or optionally, push it to an
external FieldTrip buffer (potentially run on a different device).

Note that only homogeneous signal streams (i.e. with a single sampling rate
and block size) are supported at the moment.


# License
Tia2ft is available under the 3-clause BSD license (see LICENSE.txt). This
license permits commercial use, and is compatible with the GPL license. The
licences of the libraries used in tia2ft are available in their respective
directories.


# Usage
Without command line arguments, tia2ft attempts to connect to a TiA server and
a FieldTrip buffer both served on the same computer. The following options are
supported:

  -h [ --help ]                     Show help message.
  -v [ --verbose ]                  Print more info.
  --tia-host arg (=localhost)       Set host name of TiA server.
  --tia-port arg (=9000)            Set port of TiA server.
  --fieldtrip-host arg (=localhost) Set host name of FieldTrip buffer server.
  --fieldtrip-port arg (=1972)      Set port of FieldTrip buffer server.
  --serve-ft-buffer                 Start a new FieldTrip buffer instead of 
                                    connecting to an existing one.

# Compiling

## Linux
To recompile tia2ft, a C++ compiler with the STL and Boost libraries is
required.

To compile tia2ft, you can do the following:

1. build libbuffer.a in /realtime/buffer/src by issuing "make",
2. build tia2ft by issuing "make" in /realtime/acquisition/tobi/.

Then, it can simply be run with:
  $ ./tia2ft.sh --serve-ft-buffer

The shell script adds the TiA library to the search path, and starts the
executable tia2ft.


## Windows
Compiling on windows is not yet supported.

## OS X
Compiling on OS X is not yet supported.


# Testing tia2ft
To test tia2ft, one can use the TOBI signal server to generate artificial
signals. With the TOBI signal servers version 8ea1376, a TiA serving
sine-waves can be started as follows:

  $ ./server.sh bin/server_config.xml

When this sever is running, tia2ft can connect to this server.


# References
[1] IEEE Trans Biomed Eng. 2012 Mar;59(3):852-9. Epub 2011 Dec 21. Proposing a
    standardized protocol for raw biosignal transmission. Breitwieser C, Daly
    I, Neuper C, Müller-Putz GR.

# Related links:
- http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22194230
- http://dx.doi.org/10.1109/TBME.2011.2174637
- http://www.bcistandards.org/
- http://arxiv.org/pdf/1103.4717.pdf