aka: how to solder your way through bureaucracy and burn-out

I asked OpenBCI to re-route the neural headset to Zürich. Spain had failed me. Swiss customs were gentler. More orderly. They send you a bill. You pay. No drama.

Sam (the kind soul behind OpenBCI emails) made it happen — FedEx Priority, tracking issued, a new promise on the way.

It was already two weeks late, but I adjusted. If it arrived by next Thursday, I could still save the month. I could still make data appear.
And it did arrive. On a Friday.

Except…

The delivery person refused to hand it over unless someone paid in cash.
Cash. In 2025. For a scientific device.
Paulo — who was kindly receiving it for me in Zürich — didn’t have cash on hand. No card reader, no link, no mobile option. Just: no delivery.

Back to the FedEx office it went.

So I bought a last-minute flight.
Sunday to Zürich. Monday morning pickup. Monday return to Barcelona.

If I’m being honest, the flight + Swiss tax cost about the same as the import tax I would’ve paid in Spain. Poetic, really.

When I got to the FedEx desk, I paid the nearly 300 CHF in bills. They handed me a box that felt like mythology. I had carried it for so long in emails and breath and complaint — and now it was finally here.

Then the second question hit me:
What about the gel?

The EEG headset includes conductive gel for wet electrodes. It’s not TSA-friendly. So I ducked into a Zurich airport bathroom and began scooping brain gel into cosmetic containers from the airport supermarket.

The poetic turned absurd.

---

Checkpoint: Nervous system in transit

Hours early, I sat in the terminal with my laptop, the Cyton board, a fresh battery, and the dongle.

Ready.
I plug it in.
Nothing.

The board didn’t light up.
No signal. No life.

I recharged the battery.
Still nothing.

I flew back to Barcelona with a heavy box and a heavier head. Once home, I pulled out the multimeter: the battery was dead. Fully. Quietly. Irreversibly.

---

New city, new soldering iron

I found a tiny electronics shop in Barcelona. I bought a new battery.
And for good measure: a set of air-powered backup cells.
And… a soldering iron.

Because when I left Lucerne for Barcelona, I had told myself:

This time I’m a real digital nomad. No need to carry tools.

That was a lie.

Soon enough, I was soldering again.

---

The board lives

Once powered, the board lit up like a small miracle.
The Cyton works. It speaks. The machine has a pulse.
Now it’s time to learn its language.

But before that, I had to write this. Because at one point I truly believed that when I finally put this headset on, my brain would just show a flatline.
That’s how deep the fatigue had reached.
That’s how absurd and beautiful and tiring it is to try and build anything real in this world.

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Creativity in Vitro continues.

Not because everything works —
But because we learn to live in the debugging.