Ardweeny (Tiny Arduino Clone)

I built a tiny little Arduino compatible board tonight (with the hopes of using it in my Mindwave project).

It's really slick.  There are only 12 parts and all of them are through-hole - so you don't need to be really skilled with a soldering iron.

The plan is to use this with SparkFun's logic level converter to connect to the Mindwave USB dongle (I need the converter because the Ardweeny uses 5V signals and the USB dongle uses 3.3V).

Mindwave with XCode

Here's my first functional project for Mindwave in XCode.  (This video is my third attempt to record - The frustration shows through at the beginning)

A few things for you to bear in mind:

Sometimes Mac OS X loses the Mindwave.  There are several ports that are reported and ThinkGear connector will not let you save the changes.  The port that seems to consistently work is /dev/tty.MindWave

If the port is saved as /dev/tty.MindWaveMobile-SPPDev or /dev/tty.MindSet-DevB, the installed software will not work.  I have not yet figured out how to save the port as /dev/tty.MindWave

Also, you will need to include the ThinkGear.bundle file in the XCode project.  (This can be found in the MindSet Development Tools along with a PDF describing how to add it to the project)

Got a Mindwave - time to start hacking

So, I ordered a Neurosky Mindwave from ThinkGeek.com and it arrived in the mail a few weeks back.

It's been sitting on my desk waiting to be hacked.

What is a Mindwave, you ask? It's a brain scanner.  You put it on your head, sync it up to your computer and software will begin to respond to your state of mind.

That doesn't mean that it will read your thoughts.  You can't dictate to the computer from inside your head or play advanced video games without a controller.  However, you can monitor and trigger responses based on your level of attention and meditation and eye blinks.

These three items let you do all kinds of interesting things.

The software that's included has a meditation journal, a display of fireworks that explode when you blink, a game where an and will roll a rock faster or slower depending on how hard you concentrate and a number of other applications.

So, what's the plan?

Well, I would like to confirm that I can actually read these values in real time from my computer.  Once I've done that, I will record those values to analyze later.

From there...I'm not too sure.

I'd like to try to integrate it with a microcontroller system like an Arduino.  If I can do that, then I can make things happen in the real world based on how hard I concentrate or relax.

Over the coming weeks, I will post the results of my experiments here.