Arduino will want to share ground with the Mind Flex circuit

Common ground.

Your Arduino will want to share ground with the Mind Flex circuit. Solder another length of wire to ground — any grounding point will do, but using the large solder pad where the battery’s ground connection arrives at the board makes the job easier. A note on power: We’ve found the Mind Flex to be inordinately sensitive to power… our initial hope was to power the NeuroSky board from the Arduino’s 3.3v supply, but this proved unreliable. For now we’re sticking with the factory configuration and powering the Arduino and Mind Flex independently.

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NeuroSky Board is the small daughterboard towards the bottom of the headset

 The T Pin.

The NeuroSky Board is the small daughterboard towards the bottom of the headset. If you look closely, you should see conveniently labeled T and R pins — these are the pins the EEG board uses to communicate serially to the microcontroller on the main board, and they’re the pins we’ll use to eavesdrop on the brain data. Solder a length of wire (carefully) to the “T” pin. Thin wire is fine, we used #24 gauge. Be careful not to short the neighboring pins.

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opening or diassembly of mind flex dual head set Disassembly.

1. Disassembly.

Grab a screwdriver and

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hacking mind flex dual

We decided to take a higher-level approach by grabbing serial data directly from the NeuroSkyEEG chip and cutting the rest of the game hardware out of the loop, leaving a schematic that

looks more like this:

The Hack

Parts list:

• 1 x Mind Flex
• 3 x AAA batteries for the headset
• 1 x Arduino (any variety), with USB cable
• 2 x 12” lengths of solid core hookup wire (around #22 or #24 gauge is best).
• A PC or Mac to monitor the serial data

Software list:

• Arduino Brain Library (download here)
• Optional: Processing Brain Visualizer (download here, it will help to have Processing as well)
• Optional (required for the visualizer): controlP5 Processing GUI Library (download here)

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hardware of mindflex dual head set

Here’s the basic layout of the Mind Flex hardware. Most of the action is in the headband, which holds the EEG hardware. A micro controller in the headband parses data from the EEG chip and sends updates wirelessly to a base station, where a fan levitates the ball and several LEDs illuminate to represent your current attention level.

This schematic immediately suggests several approaches to data extraction. The most common strategy we’ve seen is to use the LEDs on the base station to get a rough sense of the current attention level. This is nice and simple, but five levels of attention just doesn’t provide the granularity we were looking for.

We decided to take a higher-level approach by grabbing serial data directly from the NeuroSkyEEG chip and cutting the rest of the game hardware out of the loop, leaving a schematic that looks more like this:

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what is inside mind flex dual head set to reed eeg signals

   NeuroSky supplies the EEG chip and hardware for the Force Trainer and Mind Flex toys, these options represent a cheaper (if less convenient) way to get the same data. The silicon may be the same between the three, but our tests show that each runs slightly different firmware which accounts for some variations in data output. The Force Trainer, for example, doesn’t output EEG power band values — the Mind Flex does. The MindSet, unlike the toys, also gives you access to raw wave data. However, since we’d probably end up running an FFT on the wave anyway (and that’s essentially what the EEG power bands represent), we didn’t particularly miss this data in our work with the Mind Flex.

Given all of this, I think the Mind Flex represents a sweet spot on the price / performance curve. It gives you almost all of the data the Mind Set for less than half the cost. The hack and accompanying software presented below works fine for the Force Trainer as well, but you’ll end up with less data since the EEG power values are disabled in the Force Trainer’s firmware from the factory.

Of course, the Mind Flex is supposed to be a black-box toy, not an officially supported development platform — so in order to access the actual sensor data for use in other contexts, we’ll need to make some hardware modifications and write some software to help things along. Here’s how.

But first, the inevitable caveat: Use extreme caution when working with any kind of voltage around your brain, particularly when wall power is involved. The risks are small, but to be on the safe side you should only plug the Arduino + Mind Flex combo into a laptop running on batteries alone. (My thanks to Viadd for pointing out this risk in the comments.) Also, performing the modifications outlined below means that you’ll void your warranty. If you make a mistake you could damage the unit beyond repair. The modifications aren’t easily reversible, and they may interfere with the toy’s original ball-levitating functionality.

However, I’ve confirmed that when the hack is executed properly, the toy will continue to function — and perhaps more interestingly, you can skim data from the NeuroSky chip without interfering with gameplay. In this way, we’ve confirmed that the status lights and ball-levitating fan in the Mind Flex are simply mapped to the “Attention” value coming out of the NeuroSky chip.

 data by eric micca

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Mindflex Duel Arduino Hack

Howdy Folks,

I know there's a wealth of information on how to hack the Mindflex and Force Trainer game headset to access the EEG data they send out, so I am going to keep this brief, and try to make two points.  If you are familiar with Arduino and soldering, this is a very easy hack.

First, I had not seen anyone using the Mindflex duel headsets that came out last year, and I just want to let everyone know that while the Mindflex duel and original Mindflex headsets look different on the outside, they are the same on the inside.  I mention this because you can get the Mindflex duel game that comes with two headsets for less than the original Minflex game with one headset on Amazon these days.  I was able to get the Minflex duel game& the arduino for less than $50 on ebay

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