EMG Motorcycle Helmet Media Center

Hey all!

With my last two days as an intern here as an OpenBCI intern, Irene and I have been working on making a cool motorcycle helmet media center that can be controlled with EMG! Particularly jaw clenches, as I’ve found those to be the easiest to handle.

We started by placing electrodes into a motorcycle helmet. We placed close to each cheek for reference and BIAS. We also placed one on the upper part of the helmet, somewhere between Fp1 and F7 on the 10-20 scale.

The electrode placements seem sub-optimal and would ideally be improved upon as development continued, but for now it works fine!

We used a bluetooth stereo breakout board that we ordered from sparkfun to set up the communication from bluetooth to phone. We used a stereo breakout because it has multimedia control functionality built right in! Here’s a few pics of the setup:

Simple pinouts from an Arduino Uno

We used PIO_2 for play/pause, and PIO_4 and 5 for forward

For the board we simply used Channel 1, reference, and bias as I mentioned before. Any channel could have been used and we could have improved on the system by including even more electrodes, but as we only spent two days on the project we didn’t have much time to do everything we wanted. We had also planned on having a microphone input (useful for GPS and phone calls). The system is set up to receive phone calls already so if we could have gotten the microphone working that would have been cool.

Here’s a video of it in action! You may note that I used the same widget I did in my previous project, cause it’s super!

 As usual all of my code can be found on my github. Happy hacking!