To follow up on my earlier experiments with visualizing brainwaves I decided to work with Emily Daub to help design and sew LEDS onto a dress that would respond to my brainwaves.

On the technological side, I used the initial Max MSP patch I had modified to send values to a Lilypad that was controlling the brightness of different colored lights. The first step after I had the brainwave data coming into Max MSP was to send the data from Max MSP to an Arduino Uno and use it to control the intensity of a basic LED light. I started with attempting to get one LED working. Once I had code that allowed me to change the intensity of the light, I then attempted to connect it to Max MSP. I used a serial object in Max to output serial data to be read by the Arduino. For each of the five main brainwaves I scaled the incoming values between 0 and 255 and then used a slider to help simulate information coming in from the brainwave. Once I was able to control one LED light with the slider in Max MSP I then hooked up the rest of the brainwaves and had to devise a way to send multiple streams of data through the serial stream to be parsed out according to their relative brainwave. I did this by attaching a letter value to the beginning of each string and then parsed out the brightness values based on the corresponding letter value. Once I had five different LEDs brightness values being controlled by the Max MSP patch, I then moved the code to the Lilypad and connected that to an Xbee Lilypad breakout board so that I could use the Xbees to communicate wirelessly between the Max MSP patch and the LEDs.

At the end of the process I was sending data over Bluetooth from the brainwave scanner placed on my head to my computer which was being interpreted by the Openframeworks application built by Trent Brooks and sent via OSC messages to Max MSP where all of the data was being received and processed before being sent between the USB Xbee breakout plugged into my computer and the Lilypad Xbee breakout connected to a Lilypad that was taking the information and then controlling the brightness of five different colored strands of LEDs, each strand associated to one of five of my brain waves.