How to hack mind reading toys

[Christopher Cprek]

There was a lot of interest in my Force Trainer hack last night, so I
thought I'd share some links.

Both the Force Trainer and Mattel MindFlex use a daughterboard from
NeuroSky that outputs serial data for values of 'Wireless link',
'Attention' and Mediation. Both of these devices have the same
NeuroSky board, so the *easy* hacking instructions work for both.

It's really as simple as soldering a wire to the Tx on the NeuroSky
board to Rx serial on an Arduino. And solder ground on the NeuroSky
board to ground on the Arduino.

A ready-to-go Brain library for Arduino is in place to read the
values. I'm using a branch of the library that utilizes a SoftSerial
Rx on pin 2, instead of tying it into the hardware serial on pin 0.
This may or not be necessary, depending on your application or if
you're using an Arduino Mega (more hardware serial pins).

Instructions:

http://frontiernerds.com/brain-hack

Brain Library on Arduino

https://github.com/kitschpatrol/Arduino-Brain-Library

Brain Library for Arduino utilizing NewSoftSerial

https://github.com/kitschpatrol/Arduino-Brain-Library/tree/softserial

/Chris
Micro Colonel LVL1