Wednesday, October 30, 2013

Sparkfun EEG Hacker-in-Residence

I just saw this post from Sparkfun regarding their latest "hacker in residence".  Apparently, Sophi is going to be hacking a Neurosky "Mindwave" EEG headset to create a brainwave interface to other hackable electronics.  Cool!  Here's the quote:

Sophi: I’ll be working with Neurosky’s brainwave headset to create a hardware interface that makers, engineers and educators can use to create projects that trigger on brainwaves. I am very curious about the brainwave headset (it’s called a Mindwave). The Mindwave uses one electrode to measure attention, concentration and eye blinks. I want to see if anything usable can be registered from one sensor intended to get a signal from an object (the brain), that sits inside of a bunch of fluid and then has a skull and hair and skin on top of it.
A couple of years ago I got to ride The Ascent, which uses the Mindwave headset to control the ride. The Rider is strapped into a harness, which is connected to a computer-controlled winch. As the Rider concentrates while wearing the Mindwave, the winch pulls the Rider as high as 30' up towards the ceiling. It was an incredible experience!
I’d like to explore the different applications for this technology, such as using an eye blink to fast-forward your music while running, or wagging a fake tail at ComicCon. Do you have an idea for an application? Put it in the comments!

My favorite part is that this is exactly the kind of stuff that we're looking to enable with our OpenBCI device. I'm always happy when I find folks out there like me who are into brainwaves and into mind-control over their hacks.  Good luck Sophi!

1 comment:

  1. Hi,

    I'm about to build using the openbci kit and I hoped I could ask a few questions for some help please.

    1) As a complete novice, is the OpenBCI kit the best option? I don't want to buy a completed device like the Neurosky as I want to learn how to hack and adapt so I can experiment.

    2) I'm getting very interested in the Quantified Self and measure quite a lot of my life. I'm interested in also measuring my conscious mood throughout the day by maybe recording positive/neutral/negative feedback by clicking a button and using the length of click to measure intensity. However, when you mentioned fast-forwarding music with the blink of an eye I thought I could use this as well. However, I would want to measure this all day every day, so wearing a biosensor might not be feasible. Do you have any suggestions to solve this?

    Could you point me to any useful sites too.

    Thanks in advance,

    James

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