Mort and Mary Present: The Mind-Controlled Light Switch

Using the Mind Wave Mobile+, Mort and I created a mind-controlled IoT...solution (?) with sockets, of course!

by LightningHawk January 25, 2018 4:08 pm UTC 3

I have been wanting to get my hands on the Neurosky MinWave Mobile for a while now. The head-gear is a BLE-enabled, portable EEG device and a great introduction to brain-computer interaction. I wanted to take that a step further by experimenting with brain-computer control. Since this is my first project with the MindWave Mobile, I figured I better do an analogous "Blink Sketch" thing -- turning on an LED. I chose to use the IoT Power Relay to control a light, fan or even a TV, with a Raspberry Pi to accept the commands sent by the app.

Mort and I used the Android Developer Toolkit for the MindWave Mobile and settled on "Attention" as the control mechanism. When the attention level reaches a threshold value (mine was about 60/100 and Mort's was 100/100) a message would be sent via socket to the Raspberry Pi to make the switch on the power relay. The Raspberry Pi is running a Python script that controls the GPIO connected to the relay. It's an overly complicated way of turning off the TV at night, but I've now gotten my feet wet in Android development and got to play with the MindWave Mobile.

Where to next? Mike Hord had the predictably amazing idea to turn it into a multi-player game that shocks the players who are slowest to turn on their light. So yes, this will happen.