Neurosky MindWave and Processing – Magic & Love Interactive

This is my first trial run of a Neurosky MindWave sensor with a custom program written in Processing. The connection architecture is quite straight forward. The ThinkGear connector is a background process that reads from the IR serial port to obtain the brainwave signals and distributes them through a TCP socket server (localhost with port 13854).

There are a number of Java socket clients implementation. I use the ThinkGear Java library from Creation.

Eric Blue has another Processing based visualizer using the MindWave.

ZeroShore has another implementation with an animation called HyperCat.

Sample Code

import processing.video.*;
import neurosky.*;
import org.json.*;
 
ThinkGearSocket neuroSocket;
int attention = 0;
int meditation = 0;
int blinkSt = 0;
PFont font;
int blink = 0;
Capture cap;
 
void setup() 
{
  size(640, 480);
  ThinkGearSocket neuroSocket = new ThinkGearSocket(this);
  try 
  {
    neuroSocket.start();
  } 
  catch (ConnectException e) {
    e.printStackTrace();
  }
  smooth();
  font = loadFont("MyriadPro-Regular-24.vlw");
  textFont(font);
  frameRate(25);
  cap = new Capture(this, width, height);
  noStroke();
}
 
void draw() 
{
  background(0);
 
  image(cap, 0, 0);
  fill(255, 255, 0);
  text("Attention: "+attention, 20, 150);
  fill(255, 255, 0, 160);
  rect(200, 130, attention*3, 40);
  fill(255, 255, 0);
  text("Meditation: "+meditation, 20, 250);
  fill(255, 255, 0, 160);
  rect(200, 230, meditation*3, 40);
 
  if (blink>0) 
  {
    fill(255, 255, 0);
    text("Blink: " + blinkSt, 20, 350);
    if (blink>15) 
    {
      blink = 0;
    } 
    else 
    {
      blink++;
    }
  }
}
 
void captureEvent(Capture _c) 
{
  _c.read();
}
 
void attentionEvent(int attentionLevel) 
{
  attention = attentionLevel;
}
 
void meditationEvent(int meditationLevel) 
{
  meditation = meditationLevel;
}
 
void blinkEvent(int blinkStrength) 
{
  blinkSt = blinkStrength;
  blink = 1;
}
 
void stop() {
  neuroSocket.stop();
  super.stop();
}