The folks at Advancer Technologies just release a muscle sensor board with a great walk through posted on Instructables describing how this board measures the flexing of muscles using electromyography.
Using the same electrode placement points as the remote controlled hand we covered earlier, the muscle is measured by sensing the voltage between the muscle and its tendon. The result is a fairly fine-grained sensing of the output – more than enough to provide some analog control for a project.
The board itself is relatively simple – an INA106 differential amp is used to sense if a muscle is flexing or not. This signal is then amplified and rectified, after which it can be connected to the analog input of your favorite microcontroller. The video demo shows the board connected to a Processing app running from an Arduino, but it wouldn’t be hard to adapt this towards remote Nerf sentry turret controlled by your biceps.
Check out the video after the break to see the muscle sensor board in action.
