natKit

This is a collection of tools created to help jumpstart users on working with BCI hardware. By providing ways to connect, process, and visulize data from various peices of hardware.

Installation

Requirements

• Docker
• Python 3.9 or above
• virtualenv

From Source

Clone the repository:

git clone --recurse-submodules https://github.com/neuralbertatech/natKit
cd natKit

Create a virtual environment to install the dependencies:

python -m venv <Environment-Name>  # For example  $ python -m venv .venv

Activate the virtual environment and install the dependencies (Platform-Specific):

MacOS and Linux

source ./<Environment-Name>/bin/activate  # source ./.venv/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt

Windows (Powershell)

./<Environment-Name>/Scripts/Activate.ps1
pip install -r requirements.txt

Development Docker stack

Start Docker Desktop and wait for its Linux container engine to report that it is running. Then, from the repository root, build the repo-owned images and start the complete development stack:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build

This builds the natKit frontend, backend, bridge, and ML control plane from the local source tree while pulling third-party infrastructure images such as Kafka, Mosquitto, and NTP. Open the development UI at http://localhost:8080.

To leave the stack running in the background, add --detach:

docker compose -f docker-compose.yml -f docker-compose.dev.yml up --build --detach

If the repository was cloned without --recurse-submodules, initialize its submodules before building:

git submodule update --init --recursive

See Docker Compose development troubleshooting for common Docker Desktop, Windows line-ending, and optional ML worker issues.

Getting Started

Now to get started go to the bin/ folder and run some scripts, for example:

python ./bin/muse-2-producer.py &
python ./bin/stream-visulizer-gui.py

Additional Configuration

Docker Server

If your docker server is running on a remote machine (or a different port on the same machine), you can configure the connection parameters using the environment variables:

• NATKIT_SERVER for the server address
• NATKIT_SERVER_PORT for the server port

For example if you had the server running on a machine located at 192.168.0.12 on port 1234 you would set the environment variables with:

export NATKIT_SERVER="192.168.0.12"
export NATKIT_SERVER_PORT="1234"

(for windows)

$env:NATKIT_SERVER="192.168.0.12"
$env:NATKIT_SERVER_PORT="1234"

Troubleshooting

Execution Policy (Windows)

Run the following command from Powershell (with admin privaledges)

Set-ExecutionPolicy -ExecutionPolicy Unrestricted