Make a Mind-Controlled Arduino Robot

Measuring Your Brains with MindWave

Now let’s take the next step and make the robot respond to your brain activity!

Hack MindWave Dongle

To connect the MindWave dongle directly to Arduino, we need to modify it a little bit. See Figure 2-28.

Figure 2-28. Hacking the dongle: remove the cover; destroy the connection marked with green circle; confirm you’ve broken the connection with multimeter; solder wires to dongle

Start by removing the dongle cover by lifting it from the seam with a screwdriver.

Use a razor knife to destroy the marked connections. The point of doing this is to disconnect the dongle USB port to enable you to read data from the RX and TX pins.

Use a multimeter with a conductivity setting to confirm that there is no connection between the chip pins 3 and 4 and the four connection pins shown in Figure 2-28.

Cut four different colored 8 cm wires. Solder the wires to the dongle as shown in Figure 2-29. Start with the red wire for the first pin, marked with “+” on the board. Solder the green wire to the dongle’s TX pin. Solder the white wire to the dongle’s RX pin. Finally, solder the black wire to the dongle’s GND. If you use a flux pen, it will make the process easier, because the old solder joints will flow more easily.

Figure 2-29. Dongle connections

Level Conversion with Resistors ...