Notices

Puzzlebox Brainstorms is an Open Source software suite supporting school projects which teach robotics and brain-computer interfaces. The Client Interface software runs on a Windows PC, controlled by an EEG headset (such as the Emotiv EPOC), and sends detected actions to a remote Linux computer or mobile handset (such as the Nokia n900) which relays the commands to a LEGO Mindstorms robot via Bluetooth. This allows remote tele-operation of the robotic vehicle, steered entirely by thought. Finally, a live video stream can be sent back to the user from the robot's perspective.

An EEG headset is not necessary to use the software, a Nokia n900 can directly steer a LEGO Mindstorms robot using the touchscreen or keypad.

The goal of this project is a complete set of software tools and applications, as well as teacher resources such as lesson plans, which guide technology educators through classroom-ready projects. Students can be broken up into groups and allowed to experiment with designing and building their robotic vehicles, first racing them directly from classroom PCs, and later through mind control via EEG headset.


Demonstration video with annotations here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j8wgz-N0pgU


More information, including all software, source code, documentation, and developer tools available at the Puzzlebox Brainstorms website:

http://brainstorms.puzzlebox.info

That's completely amazing.

So.. I can this hook up to my car's bluetooth interface, right?

Wow, the result is actually amazing... though there is so many layers of proprietary (mindstorm right?) and custom sdk all over the place that such a device is really limited right now until there is a bunch of normal day usage drivers for it... Can't wait though!

If only those HMD could get miniaturized onto glasses so as to look normal, linked to a very small mind reader with an N900++ in your pocket, connected in mesh networks with I2P like encryption...

Ahhh, I wish the future was not those damn cloud crap that are going to slow down progress for 10 years just like windows did.

Anyway, cheers :-D

Its not too bad actually, everything is Open Source except the SDK for the EEG headset hardware.

The LEGO Mindstorms interface is just serial communication over Bluetooth, the same a physical serial port or USB. LEGO does provide their own Windows GUI toolkit for basic programming, but its not required and LEGO have been very supportive in general towards Open Source.

One of the side-goals of the project is in fact to work toward replacing the EEG SDK requirement with a hardware-agnostic platform. The Brainstorms software would act as a simple regression test case - plug it into the proprietary SDK and run it that way, or plug it into the Open SDK and run it another.

Any new progress since this was announced?

I'm (hopefully) going to begin programming in Qt for Maemo/MeeGo once summer (northern) comes by, and my first project was going to be a Bluetooth NXT controller.

I would be happy to offer my help if you're still working on it by then.

Hello there. Thanks for asking and yes we would certainly appreciate any help you might be able to offer!

I'm mainly focusing on the control side of the things at the moment - trying to integrate the EEG hardware with different software platforms, for example OpenViBE which can roughly be thought of as an Open Source alternative to the proprietary libraries Emotiv sells in their online store. Technically one still needs to purchase a certain level of developer license to use the Emotiv EPOC headset with third-party libraries, but the intention is to build all of the project code against the Open Source libraries anyway, so as future hardware becomes available (perhaps from competitors), the project itself isn't tied to any one vendor.

In any case that leaves a great degree of freedom regards expanding the abilities of the LEGO NXT side of the software. There are numerous controls that currently need to be hand-tweaked by editing global variables in the code, for which a GUI replacement would be ideal. That would especially include power settings and timings for controlling the motors, which would offer more customization regards the LEGO robots themselves.


Feel free to hit me directly through email, sc [at] puzzlebox.info ... or message me through the Maemo board.


Cheers

Steve Castellotti