Electroencephalography (EEG) is a powerful, noninvasive tool that provides a high temporal resolution to directly reflect brain activities. Conventional electrodes require skin preparation and the use of conductive gels, while subjects must wear uncomfortable EEG hats. These procedures usually create a challenge for subjects. In the present study, we propose a portable EEG signal acquisition system. This study consists of two main parts: 1) A novel, portable dry-electrode and wireless brain–computer interface is designed. The EEG signal acquisition board is based on 24 bit, analog-to-digital converters chip and wireless microprocessor unit. The wireless portable brain computer interface device acquires an EEG signal comfortably, and the EEG signals are transmitted to a personal computer via Bluetooth. 2) A convolutional neural network (CNN) classification algorithm is implemented to classify the motor imagery (MI) experiment using novel feature 3-dimension input. The time dimension was reshaped to represent the first and second dimension, and the frequency band was used as the third dimension. Specifically, frequency domain representations of EEG signals obtained via wavelet package decomposition (WPD) are obtained to train CNN. The classification performance in terms of the value of kappa is 0.564 for the proposed method. The t-test results show that the performance improvement of CNN over other selected state-of-the-art methods is statistically significant. Our results show that the proposed design is reliable in measuring EEG signals, and the 3D CNN provides better classification performance than other method for MI experiments.