Mind control via serial port
posted Oct 21st 2009 11:00am by Mike Szczysfiled under: toy hacks
[Zibri] found a very simple method for using brain waves as a controller via a DB9 serial port. He’s using Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer which we saw yesterday in the brain controlled Arduino. In that project the Arduino tapped into the LEDs and interfaced those signals with a computer via USB. This time the connection was made using an RS-232 transceiver to pass data from the programming header inside of the toy’s base unit to a computer over the serial port. Tapping into the programming header has a lot more potential and should be more reliable than sniffing logic out of LED connections. [Zibri] has written an application to display the received data but it doesn’t look like he’s made the code available for download.
Apparently he tipped us off about a week ago. We recall seeing this submission but as you can tell it’s a little bit light on the detail. So if you want your tips to be at the front of the line, make sure you do what you can to fill us in on all the details of your project. At our request [Zibri] provided a picture of the PCB from the Force Trainer’s base unit. See it after the break.
I have no problem releasing the code of that very lame app.. but as soon as you connect to the serial port you will see it’s not needed..
It’s plain ASCII..
It outputs values in this way:
0 0 0
40 40 0
40 40 0
40 40 0
50 40 0
50 29 0
50 29 0
30 29 0
30 43 0
30 43 0
40 43 0
40 47 0
40 47 0
41 47 0
41 56 0
41 56 0
41 56 0
29 69 0
29 69 0
29 69 0
29 61 0
29 61 0
first digit is the Attention value.
second digit is the meditation value.
third digit is the connection quality.. 0 is OK any other value means the alectrodes are not properly set or you are moving too much.
That’s all.
Posted at 11:24 am on Oct 21st, 2009 by Zibri