The Brainball Game

Phone operated door lock

brainballgame — Sun, 13 Mar 2011 09:11:43 +0000

Three weeks ago I, Anders, attended the Hackathon weekend at Stapelbäddsparken in Malmö. It was freezing cold ( +1 degree Celcius! ) inside a works building on the old Kockums shipyard. Tom and Måns, from Bambuser Hall of fame, were fiddling with the event and with a phone-operated door-lock. Here is the intro to the project – http://stpln.com/blog/?project-proposal=remote-controlled-doorlock/

I was more interested in the 3.5 mm hack as that was close to the Brainball stuff we did last spring, but got some code for the lock and started to improve the user-interface of the iPhone app. As I’m also attending the course Android and iPhone development I joined with Johnny and Niklas for a group work in the class and we decided to improve on the iPhone app. Måns gave us the Arduino server and lock, and here is the result! Måns is filming, Niklas is tapping on the phone and Johnny can be seen in the background:

http://bambuser.com/channel/M%C3%A5nster/broadcast/1480539

Appkalaset – demonstrating the lock for public

Last Thursday we had an event with the Android/iPhone class called Det Stora Appkalaset, The big app-party. More than 190 people attendended the great seminars and looked at the more than 75 iPhone/Android apps on display produced by the class and available on Appstore or Android Market. Here’s an image from the door lock table.

Niklas demonstrating the iPhone operated door lock

Later on more people arrived and filled the room as can be seen in this picture. Martin from TAT (recently bought by RIM) is starting his presentation, describing their company that started on the C64/Amiga demo-scene.

People loved the door lock, and we got some really great hints on other use cases and one guy even said he could help with seed capital. What a day!

Generic sensor interface for mobile internet.

brainballgame — Mon, 14 Feb 2011 13:59:56 +0000

An application has been sent to .SE for funds to develop a generic open sourced referencekit for connecting sensors to the internet through iPhone and Android smart-phones. Here are some possible usage scenarios built on such a kit once developed. Enjoy! Click the images for larger versions.

Playing with NeuroSky headsets

brainballgame — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 09:32:46 +0000

We have bought and received some experimental brain scanning headsets by NeuroSky. This specific headset make use Bluetooth to transmit brainwave data. It’s shown in the image below where Shane Murray is trying them out, while attending a breakfast seminar held by two people from JOIN Business & Technology (the company where Anders is working) at Ideon Innovation.

Most Android phones and all iPhones are lacking support for the Bluetooth profile used by the hardware, but we continue to look into possible work-arounds as the headsets are quite good.

Brainball at Thoughtmade

brainballgame — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:37:30 +0000

The Brainball project attended the wonderful Thoughtmade exhibition with a lot of other cool ideas. There is no official record of us being there, as we were not sure if we could make it on time. Unfortunately we were not able to take part in the rehearsal and thus had to wing things a bit.

We worked in our office until 2 PM and then Fredrik Henricsson completed the Android version during the TEDxÖresund talks taking part before Thoughtmade kicked off. It was delivered by mail to Anders just an hour before the public was let in, but we really did make it.

Our talk began with a test person putting on the headband connected to the phone. A PowerPoint presentation was then shown with different pictures, some nice, some interesting and some a bit controversial. While the images were displayed, the graph on the phone was observed for odd brain patterns. Interesting and fun, but as the graph fluctuates quite a bit under normal circumstances, the interpretation was left to the observer. Most people reacted with a bump in the graph when they were shown an image of a cute kitten.

You might also be interested in the works of Chris Hughes, who implemented a brain game in which you physically knocked down your opponent. Do watch the videos at thoughtmade.com!

A status update

brainballgame — Sun, 02 May 2010 06:09:54 +0000

Most of the time post Lund Startup Weekend has been spent on developing and designing an iPhone application. We’ve discussed topics such as interaction flow and what a GUI should look like, while maintaining a business plan and brainstorming on the values of Brainball. Some great people at Svep Design Center and Berhin Studios has helped us with these issues, thank you!

Part of the team was also present at Mobile Pitch in Malmö this Wednesday. It was an exciting event and we got some more feedback and opinions on our idea. We will also be part of two upcoming events taking part in Malmö on the 14th of May, TEDxÖresund and Thoughtmade. Hope to see you there!

And in other news, we’ve sold our second set of hardware. You can of course pick up your own set at our store.

Brainball in the newspapers

brainballgame — Sat, 24 Apr 2010 06:45:01 +0000

A few days ago, you could read this in eleven local newspapers in Scania:

In other news, we sold our first set of hardware the other day. You can also get your own kit at our store. Finally, the team would like to share another mockup of what an iPhone app could look like.

iPhone developer application approved

brainballgame — Wed, 21 Apr 2010 12:54:28 +0000

Apple has approved our company’s application as an iPhone developer. This means that we hopefully will be able to serve you a dish of Brainball in an App Store near you pretty soon.

Application development continues

brainballgame — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 11:05:24 +0000

As we mentioned in the last post, the team has gathered in Lund once again for some more work. Today we’re focusing on Android development, while also polishing the already existing iPhone prototype app. Fredrik Henricsson and Jörgen Nilsson of Wayfinder Systems, both experienced mobile phone developers, are joining us as well. We hope to have a working Android app running by the end of the day.

Brainball now also on the iPhone

brainballgame — Fri, 16 Apr 2010 15:39:03 +0000

We’d like to share a few pictures of our hardware hooked up to an iPhone. The general idea of this application, which is based on an Apple example, is measuring the electrical activity of the brain, just like the PC demo. The team still need to develop a Brainball app and will meet this Saturday for some programming fun. We will keep you posted on our progress.

Pictures from the weekend

brainballgame — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:59:20 +0000

Here are a few pictures of people trying out our prototype. The headband, which contains three electrodes measuring the electrical activity of the brain, is hooked up to some OpenEEG hardware for this demo.