Novelty Christmas gift memory stick

Quick make for last minute stocking filler. You will need a Stanley knife, a christmas tree decoration and an old memory stick. That's it.

Tomas

Physput Version 0.2 Beta ready

We have taken the beta release of Physput Ver 0.2. It has more user friendly filtering action and in general should be easier to use than the previous version. It still needs some tweaking though. I'll be trying that as I find time. The main thing is that I instaloled MS Visual Studio 2010 successfully and got the PhysPut source to build properly. So far so good ...

Oh and also installed latest Arduino programming environment ver 21.

Visuals from johns plasma speaker

Sparking audio in a more visual way. DIY plasma speaker. Not as good quality as last version but looks great!

Tomas

Plasma speaker - sparks will fly

John Malocco show us a plasma build he tried out today with a power transistor, flyback transformer from an old Dell CRT monitor and two signal generators one of which has AM input.

Tomas

Programmable movement-based switch for assistive technology applications

Ger finished the tms430 based movement switch which can be used for harnessing small set amounts of movement for switching and communication purposes. This will be put to good use outside the makers club.

Tomas

Adjustable tilt switch using msp430

Ger shows us a basis for a nice piece of assistive technology with a programmable movement based switching action.

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 9

These are the wrong LEDs. In the next clip ...once I find it I will point out the correct LEDs. There is nothing really for the general viewer in this clip. You can safely skip over it.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 8

Never press the red button it seems. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FT4YbO_1mvA&feature=related

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 7

I'm afraid this clip is one for the purist as its a shaky hand shot of the Labview instrument created for setting up the NIRS device based on the numbers of sources, detectors and modulations frequencies that you use. I have screencast this separately and will put this up in the future. We fire it up and we can see the LED sources light up as well as the output from some of the detectors.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 6

In this part Chris speaks about the power supplies used and their settings. This is more a how-t0 for this particular set up and is taking the place of a manual for our system it seems. Chris speaks of the LED driver unit - this is an important piece of kit as obtaining a stable optical signal is contingent on driving the LEDs in a highly controlled fashion. The LED driver is driven from the other piece of National Instruments kit - NI-PXI6723. The number of wires appears to be exponentially increasing....yikes.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 5

In this profound clip we talk briefly of leads we find in a plastic bag. I posted this for completeness there is nothing here to delay the blog reader avidly wondering where this NIRS story is going.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 4

In Part 4 we speak of power connectors. Its a mercifully short clip.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 3

In this part Chris stresses the importance of relieving strain on the connectors. We struggled to make this clip really interesting.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 2

In Part 2, Chris explains how the seven detectors are connected to the Labview powered National Instruments NI-PXI4462.

Tomas

Near Infrared Spectroscopy for Brain Computer Interfacing Make Part 1

Today I have posted a series (9 in total) of clips in which Christopher Soraghan gives us a breakdown of a piece of kit he developed (with Fiachra, Charles, Ray and myself) as part of his research. The complete system is a near infrared spectroscopy instrument capable of non-invasive brain activity monitoring. He used it as part of a biofeedback system for brain computer interfacing. The system consists essentially of a number of dual wavelength optical sources (LED-based) and some high quality sensitive detectors (APDs). In todays clip Chris shows us inside the detectors. These are Hammamatsu C54060-01 APDs. They are coupled to the subjects heads via optical guides (just a big fiber bundle) and these are then lined up with the APD detector.

You can find an overview of the complete system in the following paper:

www.bcl.hamilton.ie/~barak/papers/NIRS-12-channel-EMBS-2008.pd

Tomas

Amy's matlab and arduino driven robot

Tomas

Blog Hiatus

Hi folks,
We won't be posting any new blogs until I am back in the country in early-mid September. This is a pity as there are some projects ungoing. I will try to catch up with some of these later.
Tomas

Software defined radio

This week Gary showed us his progress with software defined radio. Using an AM antenna and appropriate filtering and mixing Gary was able to produce a signal which he could sample on his soundcard. The signal so sampled could then be simply demodulated through low passfiltering or envelope detection to yield the audio signal (a radio program) which you can easily hear at the end of the video. I thought this was a neat example of an increasingly important form of radio.
Tomas

Gers motion switch- basics

Ger has been building a special movement triggered switch which is used in conjunction with an Arduino and PhysPut. Ger is close to finishing a new version of Physput which we will see over the next few weeks. The switch he has built above and demonstrated above is intended to be used in conjunction with a switch-operated universal remote control (this is a specialised piece of assistive technology) . We use a Sparkfun 5DOF gyro and accelerometer board to provide a set of movement signals which are processed to yield a switching signal which drives the universal remote control. In this example Physput is not required.
Tomas

Drum machine progress

Joe is conducting a mega project to build some classic drum machines of the past. This is a quick update from him. I think this is a roland TR-808.

Tomas

Open EEG over Flash

This is a demonstration from Aaron of our Open EEG amplifier being used to measure ECG and our high throughput low latency streaming solution over the web. This is a good example of a rich internet application for signal streaming. One can easily imagine this in use as a connected health application.
Tomas

Alans guitar preamplifier for soundcard based effects

This is a guitar preamp which we have not tested properly however the really neat thing here is how Alan utilised an old cardboard component box (which he turned inside out) as a serviceable enclosure. I think this is a great idea as really in this example the enclosure forms "a durable outer casing to prevent fallapart" (classic Simpsons reference) and cardboard suffices well here.
Tomas

Very basic iPhone development with xcode and cocoa

This is my first iPhone app. I will need practice as its not trivial which I hoped it would be. While pointers are always fun I found Objective C syntax to be surprisingly...well surprising, so practise required there.
Tomas

Smalltone pedal make

Joe comes up with another great pedal. Nirvanna style.

Tomas

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Working FM mic working!

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Fm radio mic working!

Tomas

Last week / This week

Hi making folk,
I have one video post to blog from last week but I am having problems putting it up there. Everyone has been real busy with final year projects and end of year exams so I imagine it might get a little quiet for a few weeks. Joe and I will be here for sure though through the summer. Alan too. This week we could not meet though as nearly everyone was out on meetings and fun things like that. Next week though I will show you what I have done with the Nintendo guitar controller. Joe should have a couple of new pedals finished and I am sure Alan and others may have something new. Stay tuned.

Very basic interfacing with nintendo guitar controller

Tomas

Alans first PCB

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Final Part PCB complete

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Etching the PCB Part Five

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PCB Part four

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Part 3 of the PCB series

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Part Deux of the Making a PCB series

Tomas

Making PCBs a How to with Motors Malocco

This is part one of the PCB series. Thanks John.

Tomas

Found some old gaming hardware

This is the next thing we are going to get working .... Over to you Alan.

Tomas

Alans fm transmitter

Tomas

Gigging with the latest set of pedals

Great rendition of purple rain using the set of pedals developed so far. Lu Tong mcs.

Tomas

Lutong has built a chorus pedal. It seems to be working! Perhaps we ll hear it next week!

Tomas

Hydrogen fuel cell driven motor

Tomas

Location:Maynooth University,Maynooth,Ireland

First meet after last weeks launch

Great first meet! So many people so many ideas. So much potential it was overwhelming at times! We saw brain waves , strange graphical music synthesis interactivity , robots and hydrogen cells. It was a great follow up to last weeks presentation in the john Hume lecture theatre! I really like the mix we have of designers, musicians, scientists, engineers and free thinkers. If we can keep this up this is going to be awesome. Today's video is Han and dennis showing the operation of a rover robot we got a few months ago. It's working well. It just needs some imagination applied . Hopefully we ll see this go somewhere.

Tomas

Hearts on Clouds

Nice example of wireless ECG monitored in a rich Internet application - well done Aaron

Tomas

Physput - Demos

Finally got round to placing Physput online. It is not yet in a state suitable for it Google Code home. Howandever the Windows version is now ready for download. You can find it here
I have included a screencast demonstrating how it can be used with the WiiFIT (as per our last week's blog ).

Physput

Finally got round to looking at physput, a program we developed for script configurable assistive technology for alternative human computer interaction. Rebuilt it in visual c# 2008. it's alpha alpha release but it works. Will spend some time on this over the next few weeks

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_MhLPGSuHg8

Tomas

More stompboxes from joe

Joe does not know when to quit with the guitar pedals! Today he showed us 2 more... And one of them is a multieffect unit! Z.vex watch out.