Mind Poetry Mindflex Hack

Project Perceives Pondering, Prints Poetry

If poetry is your thing, this hack might convince you that your brain is more advanced than the rest of us poor sots. [Roni Brandini] designed a system that prints lines of poetry when you concentrate. The Mind Poetry project uses an EEG headset from Mattel’s Mindflex toy and pipes your brain’s signals to an Arduino Mega 2560. The system then looks for patterns of brain waves that indicate concentration. As you maintain your concentration, the system continues to print lines of poetry to a small display.

Tapping into the mindflex

[Roni] follows the standard Mindflex hack process by tapping into the data transmission pin on the Mindflex board. Optoisolation is provided by a PC817 to make sure wall power can’t accidentally bleed over into your own wetware. You could get away with just using batteries, but isolation is still a best practice.

The Arduino Brain Library is used to decipher the signal. The Mindflex picks up brain waves from roughly 1 Hz to 50 Hz, which is enough bandwidth to approximately determine mental state. For example, Theta waves are in the 4 Hz to 7 Hz range and can indicate a relaxed, meditative state. Low Beta waves range from 13 Hz to 17 Hz and indicate an alert, focused mental state. The Mindflex system is also generous in that it provides derived meditation and attention scores, ranging from 0 to 100.

It’s difficult to get a high level of precision with this sensor and sampling system, so the code uses [Roni]’s custom recipe of meditation score, attention score, and Low Beta value. He finds it most effective to trigger actions based on a relationship of these scores instead of focusing on the readings themselves. For example, an uptick in both Low Beta waves and the attention score indicate concentration.

Mindflex Brainwave Chart

If the wearer is concentrating, the system prints lines of poetry to the display and charts the three values. As an added gamification, it’ll tell you how many times you broke concentration before you completed the poem. One can imagine a game that tries to break concentration by printing other phrases or even activating an array of mechanical distractions.

If poetry isn’t your thing, you’re in luck. The “Mind Poetry” project also makes some headway (pun intended) with processing the EEG headset’s signals and triggering actions This means you don’t have to be into the poetry scene to reap the benefits. You now have the bones of a hack that lets you control things with your brain muscles and without your muscle muscles.

For inspiration, check out some other Mindflex hacks that let you order drinks with your mind (recommended), shock the heck out of people (not recommended), or even move around your skirt (uh… you do you?).

Continue reading “Project Perceives Pondering, Prints Poetry”

PiCorder: Raspberry Pi Stands In For Stone Knives And Bearskins

In a classic episode of Star Trek, Spock attempts to get data from a tricorder while stuck in the 1930s using what he described as “stone knives and bearskins.” In reality, he used vacuum tubes, several large coils, and a Jacob’s ladder. Too bad they weren’t in the year 2017. Then Spock could have done like [Directive0] and used a Raspberry Pi instead. You can see the result in the video below.

The build starts with a Diamond Select Toys model tricorder. The Raspberry Pi, a battery, a TFT screen, and a Pi Sense Hat make up the bulk of the build.

Continue reading “PiCorder: Raspberry Pi Stands In For Stone Knives And Bearskins”

14 Wheel Drive

14 Wheel Drive Vehicle Climbs Over Most Things

What do you get when you cross 7 hobby gearboxes with 14 wheels and a LiPo battery? Instead of speculating an answer, we can just check out one of [rctestflight’s] projects.

He came across those hobby gearboxes and thought it would be fun to build a 14 wheel drive contraption. Each gearbox has its own motor and is wrapped up in a nice tidy package also including the axle and wheels. All of the wheels mounted on a straight board wouldn’t be much fun so [rctestflight] used heavy duty zip ties that act as a flexible frame to connect one gearbox to the next. This allows the vehicle to bend and climb over obstacles while keeping as many wheels in contact with the ground as possible.

14 Wheel Drive

All 7 motors are powered by a single cell LiPo battery. In the video after the break it appears the vehicle can steer or that it is remotely controlled, but that is not the case. Once the battery is plugged in it just goes forward. This isn’t the first time one of [rctestflight’s] projects has been featured on Hackaday, check out his Free Falling Quadcopter Experiment.

Continue reading “14 Wheel Drive Vehicle Climbs Over Most Things”

Hacking The Crayola Digital Light Designer

[Harry] wrote in with his hack of the Crayola Light Designer. The Light Designer is a pretty unique toy that lets kids write on a cone-shaped POV display with an infrared light pen. [Harry] cracked one open and discovered it has a spinning assembly with a strip of 32 RGB LEDs for the display and a strip of photodiodes to detect pen position. These were ripe for the hacking.

The spinning assembly uses several slip ring connections to send power and data to the spinning assembly. [Harry] connected a logic analyzer to several of the connections to determine which lines were clock, data, and frame select (the strip is split into 2 16-led “frames”). He went on to reverse-engineer the serial protocol so he could drive the strips himself.

Instead of reverse-engineering the microcontroller on the product’s PCB, [Harry] decided to use a Leostick (Arduino Leonardo clone) to control the LEDs and spinner. He mounted the Leostick on the shaft of the spinning assembly, and powered it over the slip ring connections. After adding some capacitance to make up for noisy power from the slip rings, [Harry] had the POV display up and running with his own controller. Check out the video after the break to see the hacked POV display in action.

Continue reading “Hacking The Crayola Digital Light Designer”

This Is Not Your Father’s Power Wheel

If you had a Power Wheel vehicle as a kid you may have been the envy of the neighborhood. Even as fun as they were you probably out grew them. Lucky for a few youngsters, [Bob] hasn’t. Not only does he have several Power Wheels for his children to use, he does some pretty cool mods to make them even more fun.

Changing the stock motor out for a cordless drill is one of the first things that gets done. A few brands have been used but the  Ryobi 18v Cordless Drill is the favorite. The entire drill is used, including the reduction gearbox. The gearbox is switched to LOW gearing so that the drill has enough torque to move the combined weight of the vehicle and child. As much as it may sound odd to use a drill in this manner, the Power Wheel can get up to about 15 mph. A stock Power Wheels maxes out at 5 mph

Continue reading “This Is Not Your Father’s Power Wheel”

Hacking The Elefun


In a move reminiscent of many episodes of Home Improvement, [Xenon] decided to soup up one of his children’s toys. The Elefun is a toy the shape of an elephant that uses a built in fan to blow little butterflies into the air. They are notoriously weak and eat batteries like crazy. They don’t even have a plug for a wall adapter for power.

[Xenon] dug out a 7.5 V wall adapter from an old DSL modem. Since the Elefun normally ran on 6V, he figured this would give the toy a much needed boost. He began to open things up and prepare the soldering iron when he realized that he could just jam the wires into the terminals. The battery compartment screws shut, providing nice safety against electric shock.

He ended up with a much more pleasant experience for his little boy. The Elefun now jumps to life, spewing the butterflies out with ease. It actually shoots them out so quickly, he had to make some more just so the game would last longer.

This may not be the most complex hack or the most impressive execution. [Xenon] deserves some credit though, He recognized the design problems and made his own fixes for them. There’s at least one Elefun in the households of the Hack A Day staff that will be getting this treatment.
[thanks Chris]