The team choose to build a drawing robot on wheels. However, the robot is not drawing with paint but with light.

The operator of the robot will wear an EEG headset. The robot will receive the brainwaves from the operator via the EEGheadset. The robot will interpret the brainwaves as motion; meaning changes  in the brainwaves of the operator will result in changes in the movements of the robot. The movements of the robot are document via long exposure photography in the dark room. These photographies show the path that the robot is taking. This allows the viewer to see a visual history of the brainwaves of the operators brain. 

Out for three days sick last week, I came back to NuVu unsure of what studio I'd be assigned to help out with. Saeed directed me toward Sean Stevens' EEG BrainWave Art studio (I was thrilled to be working with Sean again, for he and I made some very interesting brainwave art last fall. I checked in with a few students, but was particularly intrigued by Rhett's idea for a spinning LED display. We were on our second week of the studio, and still did not have any clear idea of what the prototype would look like. After about an hour of brainstorming and planning, we agreed that a circle spinning upright would be both interesting and impressive to look at. From there, we hashed out designs found a relatively simple way to create this machine in the limited amount of time we had left. We took three differently sized circular panels of wood and attached them together. We then affixed different colors of tape around the edges of each circle (this was because we wanted to try mounting LED strips on the edges of three concentric circles, and wanted to see how well each strip could be seen). After we modeled this, we mounted it on a drill and watched it spin. Though it did create the spherical shape we were looking for, this first model had too much going on. We decided to pare the design down from three concentric circles to one single spinning semicircle, because it still created a globe shape with fewer components.

The Final Project of our team was a spinning globe with LED lights. This globe would react to changes in the brainwave activity of its operator by changing its color scheme. 

After making our our first prototype we noticed a few problems that could be revised.

First, we noticed that the lights seemed to disappear when the globe with the LED lights started spinning; creating a blinking effect. We concluded that the problem was caused by the arrangement of the LED strip; it was mounted on the edge of a semicircle. We solved this by turning our original semicircle design into a laser cut polycarbonate circle; mounting an LED strip along the entire border.

Next, we noticed that the stepper motor was not giving us enough power (we needed our circle to spin very quickly in order to create the appearance of one globe of light by way of persistence of vision). We remedied this by attaching a larger, more powerful motor that was no longer controlled by Arduino (we didn't want the design to vary speed, therefore the EEG output was used solely to manipulate lights). Sean perfected a code on Max that would make the LED strip light up different colors based on brainwaves.

Finally, we wanted to put a large wooden box around the model to hide all the wiring and innards, but it was too bulky, so we decided to leave the mechanics of the model exposed. The result was a mesmerizing visual display that easily entrances people. Believe me, I stared at the thing for about an hour straight.