Beating Life-Force Amulet

It’s one thing to see science-fiction slowly become reality, but quite another to take that process into your own hands. Inspired by a movie prop, [Eric Strebel] decided to build himself a 21st science-fiction artifact: a pulsing, life-force amulet.

At the — aheam — heart of this amulet is a blinking LED circuit which [Strebel] modified into a slow pulse with the help of his friends. To add to the surreal quality of the amulet, he sourced a stone from a local gem show, bringing his circuit along to get an idea of what the final product would look like. Once [Strebel] had shaped the stone to a more manageable size, he took a polyester filler mold of its rear face to use as a base from which to cast a durable resin housing for the circuit.

[Strebel] is using a pair of coin cell batteries which fit snugly behind the glowing LED, and in case he ever needs to get inside the amulet, he’s attached the stone to the rear with sew-on straps — super-gluing them to each piece. He went for a bit of an industrial look for the necklace — a braided oil line with a modified quick-release clasp that works like a charm.

How does this amulet stack up to one from the 23rd century? You be the judge!

17 thoughts on “Beating Life-Force Amulet

  1. “science-fiction slowly become reality” a blinky inside a rock on a necklace is hardly sci-fi becoming reality. I was expecting a ESP32 enabled pendant linked over the internet to a loved one’s fitbit showing their pulse in real time. That would be article worthy.

    1. Sadly it’s actually true that they now have a lot of that metaphysical nonsense as vehicle in SciFi.

      And in start trek discovery they even did the one thing Roddenberry insisted would never be done, they put fucking religion in the show…
      Perhaps this necklace symbolizes the constant deflating feeling one feels in his ‘life force’ :)

  2. An SMD ir led and photo diode on your finger would do just as nicely.
    Perhaps a little more discrete one might opt to stick tens machine pads on the chest and read the pulse electrically or maybe use a piezo disk or small condenser mic somewhere to listen for a pulse instead.
    No microcontroller required. Amplify and if you’re feeling fancy add a flipflop.

  3. Is there an easy way to detect one’s anger? I mean without also detecting other things that might have overlapping physical characteristics. Because if there is that would be an interesting thing to display in an artistic fashion.

    1. Addendum: those new AI chips floating around now might be a good way to determine various emotions. Put in physical data, tell it when it’s anger or love or outrage or what have you and it’ll learn to ID the emotions.
      Just don’t tell the ‘smart’ devices, you don’t want Google/Facebook/NSA to get those baselines.

    2. i only know that there is a drop in skin resistance (sweet is comming a little) when you lie, quite easy to detect and somehow remarkably reliable, i think it similarly also applies to anger, or heat exposure, the skin response is almost imidiate in the case of lieing less then 1-2s.

      1. I expect there is also an increased bloodflow in the skin and a somewhat increased heart rate, and likely a change in temperature as a result of all that. I wonder if we can detect the byproducts of the released hormones and such in the sweat of the skin. For a doable price and in a quick electronic manner I mean. Wouldn’t help to take swaps and pay $300 for results in the mail in two to three weeks :)

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