I GOT IT HOOKED UP AND I CAN CONTROL NUMBERS WITH MY MIND

WITH MY MIND

ahem. So. Yeah. It works. I’ve got a setup going that lets me control a number printing to my terminal

I would post a full schematic but I have no idea how one might make one of those, so I’ll just describe the pipeline.

  • The devkit has these little sticky sensors and I stick one to my forehead
  • The board is connected to a breadboard with the MCP3008 on it
  • The MCP3008 is connected via 4 wires to the Raspi’s GPIO pins using this breakout pin thing I bought from that same electronics store I mentioned a month ago
  • The Raspi has a program on it that constantly reads values off of the MCP3008 over SPI
  • It prints that to the terminal

I say “control”. “Control” is a very generous word. I have a small amout of influence.

Basically if I relax the number goes down and if I concentrate the number goes up.

… Ugh. There’s got to be a better way to do this. Like I hear about stuff like people with prosthetic arms they can control like a flesh-and-blood arm, and this theremin thing you can play mentally, and all this stuff. Meanwhile I’m over here making a number go up and down.

Maybe I’ll just keep taking neuroscience classes. I hear they get up to some pretty cool stuff in the higher level courses, like there’s labs and stuff. Right now we’re just writing papers.

It’s late here. I’m tired and don’t really have any other thoughts.

Oh actually, in class they mentioned there’s an internship at some neuroscience company working on BCIs I can apply to do over winter break! I should apply to that when I’m not so tired. Hopefully I get in.

Tomorrow at robotics club I’m not sure what I’ll do. I guess I can show off my setup, or get a bunch of electrodes reading.