User:Swaters3452/enes100/SnakeHat

Write problem/project Goal
The goal of this project is to create a hat that can relay the wearer's emotions to another person.

My First Task
My job will be to determine what colors the LED can turn, and then decide what color we want each emotion to be portrayed as.

Summary of actual work over first weekend
I gathered information on moods effect on various functions of the body to see what we should use for our project.

Week1 Narrative
I looked for various ways the body is impacted by emotional changes.

I found three easy-to-track ways the body changes:


 * 1) -    The temperature at extremities
 * 2) -    Heart rate
 * 3) -    Blood pressure

I first looked into the effectiveness of temperature at extremities.

Essentially blood flow to the extremities changes as an instinctual reaction based on stimuli impacting your emotion, which then changes the temperature of the area.

Generally it gets warmer as a person is happy or compassionate, cooler when someone is sad, and colder when someone is tense or angry.

It's essentially how Mood rings work.

But that has it's downfalls, cold weather, and different resting heart rates impact the temperature.

Heart rate and blood pressure respond similarly to emotional change.

Heart rate can be broken up into three categories:


 * 1) It increases when a person is angry or stressed
 * 2) Decreases slightly when a person is happy
 * 3) Decreases greatly when someone is depressed

This also has the same issue as mood rings though. Heart rate changes according to weather, and from person to person, which gave me the idea of coding in a baseline.

Essentially the device will have a mechanism to command it to read a persons heart rate and then it will compare changes to that baseline to determine emotion.

My Second Task
I am to code the LED so that it will respond to different speeds of button pressing by changing colors.

Summary of actual work over second weekend
I worked on the code to get the LED to change colors

Week2 Narrative
I worked on the code for getting the LED to light up different colors based on the rate the button was pressed.

I found two tutorials that would do this

1.

2.

I tested both, but neither worked.I decided the way to go about coding this would be to set up the button as a sensor and have the LED respond to it.

My Third task
This week I will be gathering information on Beta Waves, and helping Kevin code.

Summary of actual work over third weekend
I gathered information on beta waves and the star wars force helmet.

Week3 Narrative
This week I was responsible for gathering information on the force helmet, and seeing if it was applicable to the project.

The toy acts like an EEG machine, and takes readings on brainwaves, based on how the readings come out, the user can use the helmet to levitate a small ball.



I first looked at the | tutorial Jason found, and essential what this does is it takes the toy, and takes the readings from it and displays them on a moitor, so getting it to function for our project is simply following the tutorial and finding out what each reading means.

The machine gives these readings:


 * Attention
 * Meditation
 * High Alpha
 * Low Alpha
 * High Beta
 * Low Beta
 * High Gamma
 * Low Gamma
 * Delta
 * Theta

So I decided to find out what each of the readings meant.

According to the tutorial, concentrating on something will increase the attention reading, and relaxing will increase the meditation reading.

I then found out what the other readings meant.

Essentially each type of reading is a different frequency of brain wave, each given off while in different states of mind.

Using two websites I was able to find out the function behind each brain wave.

Site 1. Site 2.

Generally beta waves are associated with arousal, or interest, when someone concentrates on something beta waves spike.

Alpha waves tend to occur in a person who has just finished a task and is sitting down to rest, it's a more relaxed state.

Theta waves occur most often in someone who is daydreaming, or is in a drowsy state.

Delta waves occur when a person is in a dreamless sleep.

Based on the information on the force helmet, and brain waves, it seems unlikely that this will be useful in making a hat that reads the emotions of a person. It could be used to determine the intensity of emotion however, as when a person's emotional state greater they tend to have a spike in theta waves, so using the devices theta waves reading to create an output that displays how strongly each emotion is felt is a viable plan.

My Fourth task
I'm going to make the poster for the project, and find out some more uses of the force helmet.

Summary of actual work over fourth weekend
I completed the poster, and found several possible projects that can be done with the Force Trainer Helmet

Week4 Narrative
I made the team poster to finish of the team page.



I then began work on finding some possible projects that could be done with the Force Trainer Helmet.

I found three interesting, and somewhat easy projects:

1.

2.

3.

The first project essentially just wirelessly connects the force helmet to an air compressor. The helmet then takes the readings from the wearer, and as they concentrate harder the air compressor works harder. The air compressor can then be attached to any object(Like a watermelon) and then if the person concntrates for long enough the compressor will release the air into the object, and blow it up.

The second project is the easiest to do. Basically all that is needed is an arduino and some software called arduino brain library The arduino is connected to the computer, and the software takes readings. Based on these readings the computer outputs a different tone. It's not too exciting, but it's definitely easy to do, and can get people to undersstand the code so they can do something more intricate.

The last project is the most difficult to do. There will need to be two force helmets. Basically two people wear the helmet, and look at each other, and based on different levels of concentration a polarized glass plate moves, and when the two people match levels of concentration the plates move so that they can both see each other's faces. It's basically a mind reading game.