Ride your own brain waves! You don't have to be a Buddhist monk to meditate, or a Sleeping Beauty tosleep well. Achieve these altered states of consciousness, and others, with this simple microcontroller device.
What would happen if you could play a recording of brain waves into someone's brain? It turns out that there are devices that can do this. Sound and Light Machines (SLMs) produce sound and light pulses at brain wave frequencies, which help people sleep, wake up, meditate, or experience whatever state of consciousness the machine is programmed for.
This article shows you how to build an SLM for much cheaper than you can buy one. We'll do it the easy way, by hacking a microcontroller project that already exists: Limor Fried's Mini-POV kit. This cool toy blinks pictures and words in the space you wave it through, and we can transform it into an SLM simply by changing the firmware and some minor hardware.
This project originally appeared on the pages of Make: Technology on Your Time Volume 10.
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.
