User:Neilp/enes100/project1

Week1 Activities
Top Three Projects for Project 1:

1) EEG Project

2) Cavitation Project

3)Stirling Engine-Steam

The BioFeedback (EEG) was what the final decision was. The first task was to take home the Star Wars EEG toy, play around with it, get a feel for it, and write a report on the findings.

Here is the associated CONCIEVE Page for this Project: CDIO

Week1 Narrative


Star Wars The Force Trainer is a very interesting device. The fact that is it marketed as a children's toy is pretty amazing. What Neil have come to conclude about the toy is that while it does indeed measure Beta Waves (the brain activity associated with concentration), it cannot differentiate between what those waves pertain to. In other words, one could simply sit there with the headgear hooked up thinking about Calculus problems and suddenly the ball would shoot up. If it was a mindless math task such as 2+5=7, the ball would not move. That is because there is no concentration involved with such a simple problem, when it came to imagining the trajectory of a rocket being shot out of the ground, the ball once again would shoot up.

Here is a really easy to follow tutorial on how to Hack EEG devices via Arduino. Luckily they use this Star Wars toy in the example.

How to Hack EEG Toys With Arduino

My Second Task
Continue to play with the toy and create more scenarios in order to test the beta wave receptors.

Summary of actual work over second weekend
Much work was put into figuring out exactly what type of waves could be recorded, and it turns out almost all of the waves one would need to implement a successful lie detector are able to be recorded by the headset device. Based on that, breaking down exactly how a lie detector worked was the next step. Since there are no exact waves associated with a "lie", it was decided to break up what it means to lie into several parts. Increase of heart rate, blood pressure, sweat glands opening up, etc. The next move is to find which brain waves associate with each aspect of the lie.

2/28/13 Currently, I am trying to hack the headset with Arduino in order to allow the pulse monitor/sensor to hook up.

Week2 Narrative
It was decided to hack the EEG device and turn it into a lie detector. This was chosen due to the fact that all the hacks seen thus far have been simply hooking up the device via Arduino, and showing a visual graph of all sorts of different brain waves. Based off of that, it is assumed that this device has more functionality than simple Beta Waves, and thus can be hacked into something more complex, essentially branching off of the hack that has already been done.

Summary of actual work over third weekend
I have taken the base unit of the EEG device a part in hopes to find a place where I can attach the Arduino. It turns out the entire white part of the base is useless, and everything including the fan is attatched to the black piece at the top. It seems that if I were to remove the white piece, we would have ample room for hooking up the Arduino.

The base unit was taken a part today, I am one screw short of completely getting the white part off. It seems one of the screws has been stripped and is in a "cave" so this is going to be tricky. I'm thinking of turning to a dremel tool.

Summary of actual work over fourth weekend
After several high-blood pressure filled hours, I managed to handle the stripped screw, and took a part the EEG device. Inside the black device was found mounted with a logic board connected to the LED board, power, and fan. It seems there is ample space for mounting the Arduino inside, both internally and externally.