Mind-Controlled Scalextric by B-Reel

The idea is simple: what if you could control slot cars with the power of your mind? Mind Scalextric is an R&D project we developed at B-Reel that combines the latest technologies and lets people race one another using their minds.

From B-Reel’s secret laboratory comes a brain-bending experimental project utilising a number of cutting-edge tech tools.

There are few commercial devices that claim to safely read your brain signals. We ended up choosing the Mindwave headset from Neurosky for this experiment because of its unobtrusive design and affordable price.

Then we got a basic version Scalextric and started to play around with it. The principle is straightforward: there are two cars on separate tracks that you can control with a handset. The more current you let pass through the handset, the faster the cars go. You can design your track and challenge your friends. But how could we control the current with brainwaves instead of a handset?

The next step was getting an old Arduino Diecimila and starting to figure out the easiest way to connect it to the Scalextric so that we could then write a small application to control the speed of the cars using the computer, for example moving the mouse.

This involved a few steps, first of which was designing the electronic circuit to replace the typical Scalextric’s handset controller with a programmed Arduino device. The guys in the Arduino forum were extremely helpful in this case, making the process super easy.

 The Arduino microcontroller was programmed initially to fade a value up and down to make the car start and stop after few seconds. Once this proved to be working, we used Processing to enable computer-to-Arduino interaction. An early test consisted of controlling the speed of the car moving your mouse cursor. The final exciting step was connecting the Mindwave device output as an input for our setup.

Mindwave uses something called ThinkGear to let 3rd party applications read the mindset device data. Luckily Google showed us the path to a ThinkGear Java socket library that can be used with Processing to capture mind activity data from the Mindwave device.

At this point all the components are connected and working, opening the door to new ideas and exciting new developments!