Adafruit community member Will Moindrot combined Mitch Altman’s Adafruit Brain Machine kit with a hairdresser dummy to create an eerie Halloween spectacle … one that flickers at a pattern that just might induce trip cycles. (The lights are really bright, though, so unless you are watching this on video, don’t stare into the lights!)

This is a video of something I made for Halloween. It’s based off the circuit used by Ada Fruit’s Brain Machine kit. Got the electronics from RS Farnel, soldered onto Strip board, I have embedded it into a Hairdressers head. Lots of fun but I am interested in seeing how to manipulate the trip cycle, connect it to Arduino or Raspberry Pi?

Brain Machine Kit v1

Relax and rejuvenate as your brain synchronizes to a wonderful meditative state, and enjoy as you hallucinate beautiful colors and patterns from your subconscious mind!

The Brain Machine provides you with a fun, easy way to meditate, all the while being very photogenic! They work with lights and sounds that pulse at a 14-minute-long meditation sequence of brainwave frequencies. Your brain synchronizes to this meditation sequence, and you meditate. It’s that easy! And the beautiful colors and patterns you vividly imagine along the way make it fun and enjoyable. The Brain Machine works with blinking lights. Be aware that blinking lights are not good for some people, especially those prone to seizures!

Build your own Brain Machine to expand your brain’s technical skills, then lean back and enjoy the light show. They are a blast at parties, a fun way to practice meditation and trip out.L

The Brain Machine Kit is an unassembled DIY kit – all the parts needed to make it are included:

• High quality Printed Circuit Board
• All electrical components, including pre-programmed microcontroller, wires, LEDs
• Over-ear headphones
• Dark-tinted safety glasses (fits children and adults)
• Color printed overlay for fashionability
• 2 x AAA batteries included – will last for hundreds of ‘trips’

The Kit does not include basic tools! You will need to provide the tools necessary for construction including a soldering iron, diagonal cutters, drill, hot glue (or other adhesive), scissors, etc. For the list of tools you’ll need, please check the project prep page The project is not very difficult and can be constructed in 2-3 hours at a leisurely pace by someone with no soldering experience. We have plenty of testing spots to help you along.

For more information including the detailed kit instructions please visit the project page!

Cool Brain Machine photo by John Biehler!

Want to be featured on Flickr pool Friday? Add your Adafruits to the Adafruit Flickr pool.

NeuroDreamer sleep mask by Mitch Altman on kickstarter, there are 6 days left to contribute:

You can use your own brainwaves to bring you the rest you need! That’s why we designed the NeuroDreamer sleep mask. Through ambient music and gently fading lights the NeuroDreamer sleep mask weaves a subtle spectrum of brainwave frequencies — the same spectrum that naturally appear in a person as they fall asleep. Simply close your eyes and listen to the music, and let your brainwaves do the rest…

Mitch will also be at The Next HOPE conference July 16-18.

Students at Thomas Jefferson High School have been working on this project since 2005. Follow link for a video of it in action.

Moving a wheel chair just by thinking about it? Students at Thomas Jefferson High School in are doing some amazing research in neuroscience and they have figured out how to do exactly that!

Senior Connor Hann puts on a high tech shower cap like device that can read brain waves. Electrical leads on the cap send the signals to a computer, then the computer instructs the motor on the wheel chair! Simply put: think it and it moves!

Seniors in Dr. Paul Cammer’s class have been working on this project since 2005. Each year his new seniors try to advance the research. This year the progress was so impressive, President Obama congratulated seniors Connor Hann and Bina Kukusa.

After taking Dr. Cammer’s class, both young men are excited about pursuing careers in Neuroscience.

Via Twitter

Daily Giveaway | Linux Journal.

The Adafruit Brain Machine Kit provides you with a fun, easy way to meditate, all the while being very photogenic. They work with lights and sounds that pulse at a 14 minute long meditation sequence of brainwave frequencies. Your brain synchronizes to this meditation sequence, and you meditate. And the beautiful colors and patterns you vividly imagine along the way make it fun and enjoyable.

If you look close during the movie Superheroes (2011) there is an Adafruit kit being soldered. They took a nice close up. Also the Brain Machine is discussed for a few seconds!

A journey inside the world of real life caped crusaders. From all over America, these self-proclaimed crime fighters, don masks, homemade costumes and elaborate utility belts in an attempt to bring justice to evildoers everywhere.

‘Superheroes’ will introduce us to several of the country’s most famous masked heroes including, Mr. Xtreme, a 33-year-old security guard officer by day, but a goon’s worst nightmare by night. We’ll follow Mr. Xtreme on his nightly patrols through the streets of San Diego, as he tries to stop evildoers and protect the innocent. We’ll also meet the New York Initiative, a fantastic foursome of real life superheroes living together that tackle crime fighting, one Brooklyn borough at a time. Lead by Zimmer, we’ll watch as they take to the streets and try to lure criminals out of hiding with their controversial Bait-Patrols. With over 300 registered superheroes in the United States, we’ll definitively uncover the ‘Real-Life Superhero’ cultural phenomenon and discover what inspired these everyday citizens to take the law in to their own hands as they try to make the world a better and safer place for all.

NEW PRODUCT – The Brain Machine kit! Relax and rejuvenate as your brain synchronizes to a wonderful meditative state, and enjoy as you hallucinate beautiful colors and patterns from your subconscious mind!

The Brain Machine provides you with a fun, easy way to meditate, all the while being very photogenic! They work with lights and sounds that pulse at a 14-minute-long meditation sequence of brainwave frequencies. Your brain synchronizes to this meditation sequence, and you meditate. It’s that easy! And the beautiful colors and patterns you vividly imagine along the way make it fun and enjoyable.

Build your own Brain Machine to expand your brain’s technical skills, then lean back and enjoy the light show. They are a blast at parties, a fun way to practice meditation and trip out.

The Brain Machine Kit is an unassembled DIY kit – all the parts needed to make it are included:

• High quality Printed Circuit Board
• All electrical components, including pre-programmed microcontroller, wires, LEDs
• Over-ear headphones
• Dark-tinted safety glasses (fits children and adults)
• Color printed overlay for fashionability
• 2 x AAA batteries included – will last for hundreds of ‘trips’

The Kit does not include basic tools! You will need to provide the tools necessary for construction including a soldering iron, diagonal cutters, drill, hot glue (or other adhesive), scissors, etc. For the list of tools you’ll need, please check the project prep page The project is not very difficult and can be constructed in 2-3 hours at a leisurely pace by someone with no soldering experience. We have plenty of testing spots to help you along.

For more information including the detailed kit instructions please visit the project page!

In stock and shipping now!

Enjoy some photos of Brain Machines in action!

The creator of the TV-B-Gone, Mitch Altman, has turned his love of open-source electronic mayhem into a one-man business…

Many of his hacks, including the first versions of the TV-B-Gone, were built using the MiniPOV3 kit by hardware hacker Ladyada. That kit lets you create ghostly messages with a bank of 8 blinking LEDs, by waving the LEDs back and forth in the air.

By making changes to the kit’s circuitry, replacing the red LEDs with different colors and reprogramming the included microcontroller, Altman has made not only the TV-B-Gone, but also glowing lights that respond to hand gestures, an electronic “dog” that spins its tail in reaction to sunlight, a 3x3x3 cube of LEDs that displays abstract 3-dimensional patterns, and even a pair of glasses with embedded, flashing LEDs and a pair of headphones for getting your brain waves into a meditative state.

Altman is a fan of open-source hardware. The MiniPOV3 kit he uses is open source, and he recently released the schematics and code for his own projects as open source. Altman describes the decision to go open-source as a way of giving back to the hardware hacking community, which was already modifying and improving the TV-B-Gone.

“There are thousands of people who are incredibly intelligent and creative helping me, for free, and they love it,” he says, describing the benefits of open source hardware.

He’s also helped found a hacker space in San Francisco, Noisebridge, where hardware hackers (or those who would like to learn more about hardware and software) can gather to work on their projects.

“I make enough money to live the life I want to live,” Altman says. “And I love this life.”

Like all projects, TV-B-Gone universal remote control started off as a thought. More of a fantasy, really. Yet one that Mitch somehow knew he could follow through on. In this talk Mitch will show how the notion of turning off TVs in public places ended up taking over his life, providing he and his friends a living, and creating a new meme around the world. Along the way he points out some of hows and whys, as well as some of the more interesting and stressful aspects of the process. Mitch hopes to show why taking risks can be way worthwhile.

Though most known for inventing the wildly popular TV-B-Gone, a keychain that makes it fun to turn off TVs in public places, Mitch Altman is an inventor with a reputation for creating intriguing devices that amaze and delight, such as the Brain Machine, Trippy RGB Waves, and the Mignonette Game. Mitch co-founded 3ware (a Silicon Valley RAID controller company), and co-founded Noisebridge (a San Francisco hacker space). Mitch has written for MAKE Magazine and 2600 Journal, and for the last few years has traveled the world teaching people to solder and how to make cool things with microcontrollers. He is currently writing a book to teach total beginners how to make cool things with microcontrollers.

Mitch and Adafruit Industries teamed up and also created an open source hardware version of the TV-B-Gone, available in the Adafruit store.

The thing I like the most about my minipov3 project is that its not just blinky, but it has a built-in AVR programmer. That little extra makes it possible to turn the kit into a brain-machine or an LED cube. Or you could pop the ATtiny2313 out and turn it into a general purpose programmer, like uzimonkey did! Go over to his blog to see how he used his to program the Arduino bootloader into a chip with a few wires.

Apparently Mitch’s brain machine was not enough for mtbf0 who has built a RGB sine-waveform model using a Boarduino.