the cheapest, easiest to build dream goggles EVER!

Quest for Lucidity
21

eventually it might be. For now we’re using the computer to gather data because we don’t know exactly how accurate GSR will be. Most chips don’t have much flash memory and the ones that do are more expensive and need fancy programmers. We’ll make it computer operated for the time being and if there is a need for stand alone we’ll figure something out… Though under best circumstances we’d like a wireless connection to the computer… Having a device software operated offers much more flexibility and less hardware, so yeah, we’d like to keep the computer in and maybe eventually go wireless (blue tooth is not a very expensive option, it can be implemented for some 60$ and it’s probably going to go down, as many computers nowadays come with a blue tooth port (the new apple notebooks for instance))

for now, we’ll be using wires.

22

this gsr unit, when it is released will you release the plans for us to build them or will we have to pay for this and how much will it cost?

23

we’ll release the final plans (what we have so far is actually already out hybrid.concordia.ca/~victord/design.bmp ) and the software will be open source and nothing will be charged.

right now you can build it, but there’s no software to operate it. and i got some help so i’ve made a few changes to the plans since i couldn’t find some of the parts around here, but that’s no big deal, both designs work the same.

there are some issues with LPT communication under win XP so we’re considering scraping the LPT altogether and going for a serial, or both. I’m hoping with this new driver i found we’ll be able to use the LPT.

24

I don’t know much about all this, but do you think it would be possible to use very light electric shocks as signals. It could potentially keep everything very compact.

I was thinking about it as an alarm to wake me up when I tried polyphasic sleeping. It’ld be a good alarm because no-one would be able to hear it.

btw, How exactly do the goggles work? Can you see when you are asleep?

Thanks

25

electric shocks could very well work to signal lucid dreaming, the problem is the voltage that you feel an electric shock is quite high (for instance if you touch the ends of a 9V battery you won’t feel anything much, so you need more than 9v on the skin)… This means the device wouldn’t be powered by batteries anymore, so instead of reducing the size it actually adds to it… You’d probably have to plug it in the wall with an adapter and I wouldn’t trust anything home made that uses wall power, i’d be really scared of getting shocked and killed.

vibrations though are just a small motor that you offcenter… when it spins, it vibrates. You only need to attach it to the batteries and that’s about it. Leds as well, you just shove in a resistor, attach them to the battery and that’s it. so it doesn’t take that much space to begin with.

and do you mean the new goggles we’re working on how do they work or the ones i posted at the beginning of the thread?

the ones at the beginning of the thread just flash lights constantly at different hz for a light machine, or, if you use my qbasic program, when you tell it to. there’s nothing big there, though i read in some parts you should attach resistors to each of the LEDs to reduce strain of the LPT port… i’m using them with a computer i picked from a trash can, so i don’t care much about that and it seems the “strain” is not much, but a bit more research would be good.

the other ones i mentioned, the GSR ones have REM detection and will (hopefully) work in the following way:
there will be a small box attached to your printer port containing the device. coming out of it will be a wire, splitting in two at the goggled. One will stay there and power the 6 LEDS for a light machine/rem signaling… the other will go to your shoulder or maybe even lower to your finger (along the arm so you won’t be bugged by it) and have a small probe (two wires stuck to your finger basically).
These two wires will measure conductivity in your skin, which drops during rem. When the drop is noticed, the computer signals the goggles and voila, REM detection. it will be a bit more complicated than that, in that the computer software will probably have a light machine with biofeedback (GSR) incorporated, so the software part can expand a lot.

26

You can use the back voltage from an inductor. Connect a 1.5volt battery to an inductor and it builds up an emf cut the power supply rapidly and you get yourself a very high voltage that is able to supply a high current over a very small time. That’s how I think it works.

I think I’ve got how the computer side works. I’m more interested in how the brain side works. What do you see when you are asleep and the goggles turn on?

27

yeah, i guess you could build up current, even with a capacitor/transistor based circuit like the ones in solar engines… it’s worth a try, but i don’t think i’d appreciate small electric shocks when sleeping… there also might be potential health risks involved.

as for the brain side, i don’t know what to tell you… for the light machine you close your eyes and it looks the way it does when you’re lying on your back under a tree and the sun shines through the leaves and they move around… after a while you start seeing geometric shapes or patterns appear and after that i fall asleep. i haven’t tried higher frequencies yet, and i haven’t tried visualization sets either…

as for the dreams part, the only time i remember seeing the clue in a dream was a few nights ago when i had a dream about talking with my cousin over a webcam. at one point it all went red and the screen flickered… i didn’t think about the mask though so i didn’t become lucid… i guess it depends on what you’re dreaming about or how your subconscious interprets the signal.

28

This is very interesting. I would be interested in the serial port version if the LPT really is that incompatible with XP. If I were to create a boot disk, boot to MS-DOS, and run the QBasic program from there, would that fix the problem? I am a QB programmer myself, but as soon as I got XP, I figured QB might not have a practical application anymore. Well, I was wrong! :cool: I think I will build a pair of these and experiment with them myself. :om:

29

yeah, i never tried them under win XP… the boot disk idea would probably work well… Win XP is a nasty little bugger.

30

These people have made a DLL though which you can access the parallel port in Windows XP using visual basic 6.

https://www.logix4u.net/inpout32.htm

I think it’s the same one I used in 98.

31

well, at this point in time the GSR development has reached a halt… the parts i got seem to be conflicting with eachother (for those who know, the LM741 gets burnt by the ADS, or at least that’s my conclusion) so i’ll have to wait till i can get some help from someone when it comes to the electonic parts.

All we’re trying to do is basically find a way to convert a relatively small current (from 0V to about 1V max) to digital, we just need to find a way to allow the computer to monitor this value in real time… which seems easy enough, but the I2C to LPT approach might be a little too complicated for our needs.

32

And the answer came from stealing other people’s ideas :wink:

The GSR2 comes with this software (well, if you buy the package) that allows you to connect the GSR to the computer and plot graphs and play games and what not…

The thing is, the GSR doesn’t have any analog to digital converters… what it uses is the sound :smile:

Basically, you just convert the voltage to sound which changes in frequency with the variations in voltage. You shove in a headphone jack and plug it in the computer through the line in jack. And there you have it. All the software has to do is measure the sound frequency in real time and plot points on a graph at every x seconds. To make the readings acurate in volts, we can just figure out what voltage corresponds to what frequency, figure out the proportions and just convert the Hz back into V on screen (when you plot the graphs).

I ordered two samples of the AD7740 which will (hopefully) work nice and easy (which they probably won’t, there’s no nice and easy :grrr: but i’ll figure it out :grin: )

Good news though :happy:

It makes the ENTIRE device that much easier to build and that much cheaper. And we can still use the LPT for the light machine and the vibrating alarm and all the other cool stuff we wanted, we just don’t need to worry about having it also READ information from the device, which eliminates more than half the components i was using for I2C to LPT…

I’ll keep you updated.

33

i bought one and it is awesome feels great after use!! man make one or buy one cheap( try ebay )

34

i thought of something the other day,

I am not a technical guy with electronics experience so i am not going to do what i am about to say, but i am sure when MeusOpusMagnus is free again he could try this.

Okay this may or may not of been done before
but i thought it would be good to buy off ebay a used novadreamer or even buy a remdreamer from here www.remdreamer.com then take it apart and find the rem detector. Then try hooking up the rem detector to their own novadreamer idea in the making. If this is not possible then they could try finding the same rem detector from the used nova dreamer or rem dreamer and find it’s name or model number, then do a google search to find where you can buy it, then they could write to the company an email asking for a sample and when they recieve it then you could start work on the unit. Or i even thought can’t you take a novadreamer apart make a list of all the components you need to build the device, then post plans, and price cost to build it yourself. Then put the plans on the internet freely available, of course this way does violate copyright laws but so what, there just plans then anonymously upload the plans to the internet and then we can get started on building them and nobody would know. I take it this is what MeusOpusMagnus is doing with the gsr unit, as this is going to be freely available as well.

Well that’s my thought, i hope somebody could do it.

35

EDIT:
Got some stander printer cables. And I hooked up a couple LEDs to some of the wires and they don’t go off at any time. The LEDs are on all the time, and they don’t seem to blink.
Any ideas? thx

36

bump

37

i’ll get back to this tomorow, i’m in a bit of a hurry now.

38

nm, I have figgered this out. Thx
Few tips for people still thinking this is too hard.

For starters check this page to learn about LEDs, along with what side is the LEDs ground.

kpsec.freeuk.com/components/led.htm

second the “Circuit Diagram” shown(on hackcanada.com/homegrown/wetware/brainwave/) must be followed 100% you can’t just hook up random wires and still have it turn on and off. So you need to know the number of the wire. As for readding it, at first I was like WTF but an easy way to look at it is that the trangle is the +plus/power and the other side of the trangle is the ground.

If your using the printer cable you have one major ground, unlike the parallel ports 18-25, and of course the ground is the one without the plastic protection on it.

And the way to label the wires on the printer cable is to use a battery and put the ground on the -(negative) and then put one of the color coverd wires on the + (positive) on the battery. Then using the LED drag it along the other side of the cable(the one that is going to connet to the computer when your finished). You only need to touch one pin at a time with the anode side of the LED, the cathode side can just touch the metal side of the connecter. If your saying WTF to the last sentence then read the LED page I posted above. When the LED turns on you have found your number, the number should be printed on the inside of the connecter. Might need a light to read it.

39

:smile: yep, that’s how you do it.

if you have a multimiter it’s a lot easier, you check for conductivity, but i guess if you have a multimiter it’s because you know how to do this kinda stuff anyway.

so the battery trick is the way to go… make sure the way you connect the leds to the goggles is the same as the diagram (in terms of number, which number goes up, left, right, which eye, etc)… else the preset patterns will become kind of random. all you need to remember is the number of the pins though, because with lpt the functions are something like:

turn on pin 2
wait whatever time
turn off pin 2

whatever’s connected to pin 2 doesn’t really matter, the port will output voltage. of course, there’s other pins, but the first 8 (since 8 leds) work this way.

so yeah, let me know how it goes and if they work for you :happy:

as for the rem-dreamer idea (the gsr unit is on hold right now, i was terribly busy with school, but i’ll get back to it soon, we were making some progress) it’s a good idea and someone could obviously reverse engineer the mask… the problem is the microcontroller software (because the mask is operated by one) which i really don’t know much about… so someone else would have to figure that out… AND, the second problem, is the price… if i could have bought one, i would have, and i wouldn’t bother trying to make clones/variations of the device. Sure, once I’d have it i couldn’t resist figuring out which parts it uses, how they work, etc, i always wondered that. But yeah, i can’t afford buying one and not even knowing if it will work properly.

40

well MeusOpusMagnus you seem to be the electronics wiz kid,
so i say to everyone reading this thread ‘let’s all donate to you MeusOpusMagnus’ say 5 dollars each. That way 30 people donate and you have your rem dreamer. I think this way does work the best, it means you can find out what rem detector there using and you could buy it from a supplier and start making clones or use it in your own system.

I will donate to you 10 dollars

Please guys reply with at least 5 dollars or more, anyway what is 5 dollars. Come on it’s for a great lucid dreaming project. The sooner you donate or the more you donate then the easier it will be for this project to start.

Just reply with your donation limit, then MeusOpusMagnus can setup a paypal account unless he already has one, and then it simply donation time.