MindFlex teardown

posted Nov 7th 2009 2:30pm by Nick Caiello
filed under: toy hacks

Maybe we’re just imagining things, but it seems to us like brainwave control is the latest trend in toys. Similar to Uncle Milton’s Force Trainer, Mattel has recently released the MindFlex, a game that involves moving a plastic ball up and down through an obstacle course that you control using your brainwaves. Naturally when [Alpha] saw this, he decided to take it apart and document what he found. After disassembling both the headset and the base, he found that most of the chips were covered in black resin making them unidentifiable. However, he was able to find identify one chip, the NeuroSky TGAT1-L64 D498Q-010 0924. Judging by the name alone, we would guess that this is the chip that makes the brainwave control possible. While there’s no mention as to whether you’ll be able to interface with this like you can with the Force Trainer, we’re sure that it’s only a matter of time before someone figures out how to use this to control more than just a floating plastic ball.

Comments [25]

tagged: brainwave, mattel, mind control toy, mindflex, neurosky

Reader Comments

On the german amazon-page you can find a description that it als works if you touch only your fingers with the electrodes and it is suspected to only use random movements… can somebody check if it does the real thing or is fake?

Posted at 2:44 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Freax

It seems like brainwave control has come in and out of vogue since the days of Omni magazine. I’m sure the technology has improved, but it sort of seems like the technology equivalent of ska in that respect.

Posted at 2:46 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Exlud

i checked out the website of the chip its defiantly mind control or at least it gets readings from the sensors

Posted at 4:58 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by roy

Regarding chips covered in the black epoxy resin (it is epoxy, right?) — could you use something like the solvent below to dissolve it and make probing the chip a bit easier?

http://www.hisglassworks.com/cart/cart.php?m=product_detail&p=99

Posted at 5:11 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Jon

Yeah, get some industrial strength paint stripper and have some acetone handy to wash it off the chip with. Recommend against rubber gloves, unless you know the paint stripper won’t melt them. Melted gloves + hands = bad.

Posted at 5:24 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Mr. Mib

@jon
if you do that the chip will be destroyed.

I was thinking of an alarmclock that you could press the “sleep” button with your mind.

OOH! better yet,
an ipod that you can go to the next song with your thoughts. shouldnt be too hard, just take the motor control system and measure the pwm. if it reaches a threshold, set off the “next” button.

Posted at 5:43 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by googfan

@googfan
The problem with using these devices in those types of applications is that so far they all seem to require you to concentrate on a single thought. So every time you wanted to change a song on your player you would have to sit still for a few seconds and concentrate on one thing.

It would be a cool little project and a neat novelty, but there aren’t many realistic situations where that would be useful. For example, I am generally sitting at the computer working on something when I am listening to music. I wouldn’t want my song changing every time I think about why a function isn’t working the way I intended.

Though I imagine there are some interesting applications for a device that reacts to concentration or relative stress level. In fact, a few nights ago I was thinking of a way to use one of these to build a meditation trainer. Punish the user with something annoying (loud noise, electric shock, whatever) if their concentration deviates for too long.

Posted at 6:22 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by MS3FGX

Shame it’s only for US. I would really like to play around with one.

Posted at 7:08 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Sammy

The black resin has never stopped people from reversing chip logic before..

I’d like to see it do controls by high frequency signals so you wouldn’t have to wait to create a state.

Posted at 7:52 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by tj

this is not real mind control. if it was you wouldnt have to turn a dial. Fuck Mattel

Posted at 8:49 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by Fake fake fake

@exlud except brainwave control is cool. ska isn’t.

Posted at 9:32 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by cyanide

actually if you take a look at uncle miltons pcb prints you’ll see neurosky made the board and chips for the mind controller. been thinkin about buying the chips and just building my own actually.

Posted at 10:16 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by wolfy02

@wolfy02

good luck with that. neurosky will never give the datasheeets away let alone the chips.

Posted at 11:20 pm on Nov 7th, 2009 by googfan

wolfy02 makes a good point. It’s like this with most chip makers. It’s how you create incorporated vendor lock without breaking trade laws. I’ve dealt with this first hand with Zilog and TI.

It’s done partially with availability, but it’s constant with special features especially pertaining to embedded security APIs.

Posted at 12:42 am on Nov 8th, 2009 by tj

I’d be wary; If I were writing a game for the average Joe based on mind control, where you /CANNOT/ lose, I’d probably think about adding in failsafe, if tries>30 forceWin = 1… you know, in case Joe has trouble thinking for himself and stuff.

Posted at 3:59 am on Nov 8th, 2009 by fragged

Yet another in a long line of crappy myoelectric faux-brain-control (they’re only measuring muscle contractions, don’t kid yourself) toys. OpenEEG to the rescue! http://openeeg.sourceforge.net/doc/

Posted at 5:30 am on Nov 8th, 2009 by EdZ

@EdZ no. thats not how this thing works at all. You are supposed to avoid making faces. and you’re not supposed to move around at all.

Posted at 11:49 am on Nov 8th, 2009 by walt

@ googlefan

https://fjallfoss.fcc.gov/oetcf/eas/reports/ViewExhibitReport.cfm?mode=Exhibits&RequestTimeout=500&calledFromFrame=N&application_id=735074&fcc_id=

here’s all the info you’d need to get started really. This was thanks to zibri from an earlier post. should really check out his site, it’s as best a place to get started.

http://www.zibri.org/2009/09/may-force-be-with-you.html

Posted at 12:49 pm on Nov 8th, 2009 by wolfy02

You’ll notice that if you do make faces, the game becomes incredibly easy.

These sort of devices are fine if all you want to do is flip a switch in an incredibly overcomplicated manner, but if you want anything more complex than on/off, they’re useless and you’re better off creating your own solution. I wonder how easy it would be to hack your own low-resolution fMRI hat.

Posted at 4:45 pm on Nov 8th, 2009 by EdZ

Lets face it… they try to record a very small signal which is coming from somewhere inside a splashy grayish mass of living cells and blood vessels…shielded by an 6-7mm thick skull surrounded by muscles, skins and hairs…

Everybody who expect that this toys can really do more rather then playing a bit around with the noise-level here is an analogy…

try if you could place some electrodes outside on your PC chassis and try to record the content of the ALU of the third core of your quad-core processor in real-time during that you should run a povray rendering on all four cores, play MP3 on the internal sound card. Copy the content of your partion 1 to partion 2 and burn a DVD….

if you succed with that you might can try again to read thoughts….

Posted at 1:39 am on Nov 9th, 2009 by Tux-fan

I’ve got to agree with tux-fan. To pin-point with such accuracy would be insanely hard, not to mention the other technological hoops we would have to jump through first. But this is most definitely the first step in the right direction.

Posted at 7:13 am on Nov 9th, 2009 by wolfy02

I think this is much better:
The Journey to Wild Divine
http://www.wilddivine.com/

Posted at 12:16 pm on Nov 9th, 2009 by concino

another site killed by hackaday

http://www.bigmech.com/misc/mindflex/

Posted at 7:38 pm on Nov 9th, 2009 by venetian

i tried one of these out at pax, it actually worked pretty well. it was controlled by the amount of brain activity. to make the ball go down you had to relax and clear your head, then when you want it to go up, you start doing some simple math or anything that excites you. it sure was hard with all the booth babes in the area though. you feel kinda silly with those things clipped to your ears.

in the end, its really hard to control and i cant imagine it being to accurate. and i don’t think it would work for multiple actions, might work well for a mind controlled dimmer switch though.

i suspect this thing is only measuring blood flow to the brain, but i really don’t know. i just don’t see any other reason to clamp it to your ear lobes.

Posted at 7:08 am on Nov 10th, 2009 by austin

It’s a cool game but always out of stock.

I just wanted to share a website that I found that will alert me the instant Mindflex is back in stock at Amazon. You can use it for any item at Amazon for that matter. It checks Amazon every few seconds automatically and alerts you the moment your product is back in stock.

Here is the link (the item # is for Mindflex).

http://az-grabber.net/?item=B001UEUHCG

You can also just go to http://az-grabber.net and search for items.

Posted at 11:09 pm on Nov 18th, 2009 by John Tyler