Mind Control part 1
Have you ever wished you could move something with just your mind? Well now you can! (Sort of...) This project, which I'm dubbing "mind control", is going to show you how you can read you brain and hopefully do something interesting with it!
First off: hacking a MindFlex headset! The MindFlex headset has some neat hardware in it that lets it read what is going on in your head. It sends this data to the main MindFlex game. Howerver we are going to intercept this data and send it to an Arduino! Others have done this before. However, we are going to do something special with it!
Start by taking out the batteries and then opening up the headset (the side with the switch). Note: this will probably void your warranty, proceed at your own risk. There are four screws that must come out. You should see a large chip on the bottom right. Near the bottom of the chip there are six pins. The top left one is labelled 'T'. This is basically the serial out pin of the chip. Solder a wire (carefully!) here. You will also need to solder a wire to ground. The easiest place to find ground is on the far right where there is a black wire attached. Look at the picture to the right and below for reference.
I used a dremel to cut a small hole to route the wires through. I then added a small bit of hot glue to provide stress relief for the wires.
Great! The headset is all ready to go (after you put the batteries back in of course)!
As for the Arduino, I used a touchscreen tft to display the data from the headset. You could just have it write to the Arduino serial console instead.
You will need some libraries to for the Arduino. Fortunately someone has already made a wrapper for the data that the headset sends. You can get the library from GitHub here. I also used a library specific for my tft screen. The library was called MyTft yet I can't seem to find where I got the library from.
The code is quite simple. The Arduino checks if the headset has sent information. It then retrieves this information (specifically the attention and meditation) and draws to the screen. I'm not going to go through all the code as the brain library has some good examples and your tft screen will have specific code. However you can get my code here.
Congratulations! You now can read what is going on in your mind! Play around with the examples included with the brain library. Next post will be about how to use this with the Raspberry Pi for something fun!
First off: hacking a MindFlex headset! The MindFlex headset has some neat hardware in it that lets it read what is going on in your head. It sends this data to the main MindFlex game. Howerver we are going to intercept this data and send it to an Arduino! Others have done this before. However, we are going to do something special with it!
Start by taking out the batteries and then opening up the headset (the side with the switch). Note: this will probably void your warranty, proceed at your own risk. There are four screws that must come out. You should see a large chip on the bottom right. Near the bottom of the chip there are six pins. The top left one is labelled 'T'. This is basically the serial out pin of the chip. Solder a wire (carefully!) here. You will also need to solder a wire to ground. The easiest place to find ground is on the far right where there is a black wire attached. Look at the picture to the right and below for reference.
Great! The headset is all ready to go (after you put the batteries back in of course)!
As for the Arduino, I used a touchscreen tft to display the data from the headset. You could just have it write to the Arduino serial console instead.
You will need some libraries to for the Arduino. Fortunately someone has already made a wrapper for the data that the headset sends. You can get the library from GitHub here. I also used a library specific for my tft screen. The library was called MyTft yet I can't seem to find where I got the library from.
The code is quite simple. The Arduino checks if the headset has sent information. It then retrieves this information (specifically the attention and meditation) and draws to the screen. I'm not going to go through all the code as the brain library has some good examples and your tft screen will have specific code. However you can get my code here.
Congratulations! You now can read what is going on in your mind! Play around with the examples included with the brain library. Next post will be about how to use this with the Raspberry Pi for something fun!
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