Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service YouTube and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/3186 Thanks!
good evening everyone and welcome back
to fire shunks before we start uh a
quick block of announcements you can
send us questions requests or memes on
Mason by posting uh with the # sh23 and
public visibility you can send us
questions on IRC uh in the channel sh23
on ic. hack.org we've got a uh social
viewing experience in the aquarium on
jitsy uh the link for uh to that can be
found on fire.org uh we have a YouTube
and a twitch channel uh under name fire
shunks uh where we also have a live chat
where you can ask questions that we will
pass on to the speakers uh our main
streaming platform is streaming.
media.ccc.de
um where we also have a relive where you
can rewatch past talks in case you
missed them um we're a bit difficult to
find on 37 C3 that's because we are
about 30 kilm under the parking garage
please bring your own
drill we're happy to present the talk
encapsulated
electromo electromyography with mayo and
Ras raspy by C Chan and Alex Le cchan is
a hacker and CS person from renela
Polytechnic Institute they are now
studying at the univiversity of Maryland
where they are very good at
computational text analysis and
resuscitating abandonware Alex leech is
an artist educate and technician they
currently serve as assistant director of
the HCM program at the University of
Maryland where they have taught courses
on programming interaction design and
Fabrication since 2019 their recent
projects include interdisciplinary
outdoor installations like aqual a
capacitive Stone installation and Fiddle
hex let's talk 10-year-old Tech de Maya
Al was one a really strange way to
control a computer and then became a way
to do fine Grand biom muscular
electrical detection research this is a
talk about how to make a Mayo how to
hook a Mayo to a Raspberry Pi freeb in
2023 and from there how to have the
armor communicate over serial to other
devices hello welcome to my talk for
fire shunks 2023 encapsulated electrom
myography with mayo and raspy uh
pneumatic sculpture with invisible
controls this talk uh is brought to you
by me Alex leech the talking person and
my collaborator C Chen who was the lead
programmer on the project
so introduction who are we C Chen is a
hacker and computer science person who
is responsible for the python script
repair and the myof functionality on the
Raspberry Pi my name is Alex leech I am
a sculptor and a human computer
interaction person my job is to build
actual sculptures that move uh so I do
the mechanical engineering and to do the
talking on the project as well as to
come up with some of the debugging for
the scripts we work together as a team
to put this together in the fall of 2023
as you can see it is a project that
involves a lot of pneumatic balloons
made of disposable
objects so this is an emotive sculpture
project the goal of the project was to
make the audience feel something and the
secondary goal of the project was to fix
up some abandoned wear that we had
wanted to work with for a while so I
have had a bialic myo armband since 2014
when the project was still kicking and
was still an independent project uh and
I wanted to see whether it could be put
together so that it would fit in a small
beautiful display package the actual
sculpture was inspired by Soft Robotics
and some artworks that elicit reactions
from the audience so there's a common
thing in HCI where people are like I
want my project to make people feel
something I want them to laugh and be
cheered up or I want them to be you know
I want to be able to discuss them I can
read an expression and show something
that will change people's feelings but
we have a whole discipline that does
that it is called Art so that is what
this sculpture is
for we wanted to do this by
encapsulating some Hardware in this
small box you see here so this box is
laser cut and these parts are all made
of disposable stuff in order to really
emphasize the DIY or rapid prototyping
uh approach to project production uh and
what we went with was the again phalic
myo armband uh loaded onto a Raspberry
Pi model 3B plus and we wanted to work
with this project called uh programmable
air by a guy named Tinker mind at ITP
NYU so the programmable air project is
part of a Soft Robotics prototyping
toolkit which can be used for things
like grippers or uh mostly grippers
actually vacuum holders or also
aesthetic devices which is what we were
interested in using it for
the key elements of this project which
is a kinetic sculpture are that it is
made of disposable elements or trash in
order to capture that DIY rapid
prototyping aesthetic that means that it
was designed around 3D printed parts
that were intended to use bamboo skewers
or coffee St stir sticks or uh other
types of common work in order to
assemble a thing that was greater than
the sum of its parts this is also why we
went with condoms because when we were
working with latex balloons we found
that they popped a lot where condoms
generally just do not break if you do
not do something really absurd to them
they can stretch and then recover their
shape really effectively uh and they
also work really nicely with themes of
feeling or
sensation because their form obviously
gets to mimic really organic shapes all
the time this was also inspired by the
corpse flower the Titan arum
which is a flower that blooms about once
a year and it smells very strongly of
Decay compost so we wanted to bring all
those themes together to make a
sculpture that both rose up and
stretched towards the surface of the
Earth or away from the surface of the
Earth and then collapsed backwards in a
really dramatic way but without any
visible interaction with the sculpture
itself we want it to do this sort of off
from to one side from the person who is
performing the control of the
sculpture so in order to do that we
needed these controls to work pretty
seamlessly we needed them to work like
magic the idea was that when you did a
gesture in the armband the sculpture
would respond with invisible or seamless
controls so we have pneumatic we have
pneumatic actuation within the actual
sculpture when we fill it up with air
using the programmable air but the
controls have to come in from somewhere
else and they have to be kind of hidden
the seamlessness contributes to the
magical effect of uh suppressed
infrastructure infrastructure that's
hidden under the surface of things and
in the meantime the Arduino platform
inside of the programmable air maintains
peristalsis which is uh an internal
pressure for the breathing effect in the
sculpture
itself we chose the myo armband because
it did not seem to be a great choice it
had been sitting on the shelf it has a
lot of challenges so a little bit about
the thalmic Mayo project uh the phalic
Mayo came out in and around 2014 it was
out of waterl Ontario the company that
put it together put it together entirely
on their own inh house which was
exciting at the time a lot of people
were prototyping hardware and then the
company got bought it got bought by
company called control labs and control
Labs got bought by facebook/ meta which
means that you can now buy myo armbands
but there isn't a lot of support for the
myo armband software packages that go
with them they're all pretty old they're
about 11 years old they're not out of
date exactly but it can be tricky to
find them and with the internet being
the way it is there's no guarantee that
that software is going to keep being
reliable as we move forward into the
future so we thought that was an
interesting opening for some hacking or
at least to figure out how people are
working with this
the programmable air prototyping project
by Tinker mind is great so this uh is a
little project for making sure that soft
robots can get tested out in a reliable
and consistent environment it comes with
two pumps one for suck one for blow you
can set it up to do valve controls and
differential pressure controls it has a
little pressure sensor and an indicator
as to whether to how intense the vacuum
or the suction or the inflation is in
the project and three valves to be able
to control three different ways of
putting
that pressure into a pneumatic system
and the thing is this is actually great
it mostly just works straight out of the
box it works as depicted although most
of the examples are uh a little bit less
well-maintained than one might want I do
not really feel the need to explain a
Raspberry Pi model 3B plus to this
audience but in case you're wondering we
did have to go buy a bunch of new SD
cards for it uh it seems like the
Raspberry Pi software needs a lot more
than 4 gigs to run these days which is
nice for it I
think so here are some caveats about
working with a piece of abandoned
Hardware or semi-abandoned Hardware or
like Hardware in some gentle forms of
Decay the first thing is the Mayo has a
lot of caveats to how it works it takes
a bunch of time to get used to what it
is doing it has to be plugged in to
charge it has to be unplugged to turn on
so in order to work with it what you do
is you plug it in you plug the dongle
into whatever platform you're working
with then you unplug the Mayo from it
and you leave the dongle plugged in and
then it can pair the control code that
you're working with the python control
code by default the myo armband will
lock up and stop receiving gesture
inputs if you double tap so you have to
edit that out of any Library you're
working in in order to make sure that
your gestures don't accidentally turn it
off uh as mentioned the Bluetooth dongle
absolutely has to be plugged into
whatever platform that you're working
with otherwise you will be reversing how
to pair one of these to a main computer
it's simply much better to not lose that
dongle to start with and then the last
one which is really interesting the Mayo
stores all of its gestures on board so
all gesture registrations have to be
pre-built in a Windows laptop with the
abandoned thalmic software thalmic uh
myoc connect uh this is important
because the Mayo armband by default
comes with a library that was tuned on
some pretty beefy forearms some uh some
large masculine dude's arms and so if
you have smaller arms or if you have
much beefier or forearms your Gest won't
register the same way into the myo
armband we also had some problems when
we were using this for performance uh
where a differential a differing stress
level in the presenter would cause
gestures to be recognized in different
ways so that was really interesting and
that was one of the caveats we found
from working with it it is still really
reliable I would rather use a myo
armband than build my own gesture
recognition armband I do not really want
to build my own electromyography project
and I think this is a good answer to to
that the build quality on these is
really solid it's probably worth 150
bucks to not have to build one yourself
but working with it is a really
particular experience and we probably
could put more effort into making that
uh work properly for the next time we
worked with
this so how does it work once we turn
that armband on what are we actually
doing so over here we have the myo
armband it pairs through Bluetooth into
the Raspberry Pi 3B Plus using our
custom myoc serial. py library that we
wrote uh we wrote we wrote a script to
control it uh the Raspberry Pi once this
is turned on myoc serial. py detects
over the port 9600 sorry over bod rate
9600 that the Arduino Nano is also
turned on and listening so all three of
these things have to be listening on
9600 we tried listening on different
bands but it seems like the armband
itself really prefers 9600 as a b rate
and so it is best to Simply set up
whatever you're listening to over here
so that everybody can listen on the same
B once it's turned on and going this
piece of python scripting detects
whether there is an Arduino Nano
available and then it will send the
Arduino Nano poses that ad hears from
the myo armband as they come in so the
myo arm band detects poses like fist or
finger spread or any of your gestures
and then it pushes those out over the
serial port to the Nano which is also
listening on that
band what did we hack to make this work
so we did not write this code raw from
scratch although we kind of did so my
collaborator C wrote most of our scripts
directly in the Raspberry Pi in order to
make sure they were working using the
Nano platform there are other ways to do
this but it was ultimately simpler and
somewhat easier uh given the restricted
number of USB ports available when the
Mayo is plugged in to do this directly
inside of the system and then extract
the code out afterward words to figure
out what we had to edit we went really
spelunking into the depths of the
internet we found a 6-year-old Library
called Raspberry Pi by shaan on GitHub
which was based on Zoo's Mayo raw output
work almost every piece of mayo work
that exists that is not based directly
on thalmic labs's work is now based on
Zoo's myor raw outputs it's a very
legible project and I highly encourage
you if you want to work with this to
work with that directly but we found it
easier to consider what shaan had done
in order to put together a myob based
control for a Lego C where it turned
left and right so by comparing the two
libraries and reading them back we were
able to write our own to output
something that would control an a Ras
that would control a programmable air
through the Raspberry Pi we also had to
go into the programmable A.H library
because it automatically turns on on
port
115200 in order to listen on a serial
Port so we had to remove all calls to
the serial Port from the base library in
order to make sure things were
normalized to uh 9600 bod on the serial
Port I keep saying Port because my usual
job is just working with the internet
and it is difficult to remember which
words to say one so here we go myoc
serial. py we store the pose on the band
itself so this was the most interesting
Discovery was that once the Mayo is
properly tuned and calibrated you can
turn it off and leave it on a shelf for
months and it will keep those poses it
will keep what gestures it expects from
your muscles and what those gestures
turn into and outputs them into uh a
readable serial call the myor also shows
a b rate of 9600 for serial
Communications so this was an early
block on working with all of these
libraries together was they would turn
on properly but we couldn't figure out
why they weren't talking to each other
and it was because their serial port
preferences or their serial bod rate
preferences were buried inside the
libraries and themselves so a big piece
of this kind of work is elevating
connections that are hidden inside these
libraries and outputting them
properly from there we convert these in
andout commands so that the Arduino
listening on that same B rate can
translate them into an actual
action this was a major piece of work
like putting together myo seral figuring
this stuff out was a pretty major and
serious piece of work and yet it doesn't
seem so serious when we talk about it
so here's a demo video of this working
and let me walk you through what is
happening here so here we have uh my
collaborator C is spreading their
fingers which causes our robot to
collapse in a really dramatic way then
they're resting for a second which kicks
in the peristalsis and then they're
clenching their fist at which point the
robot comes up and becomes very buff and
and and inflated and strains at the axis
they relax their fingers and we can see
the robot drops off again just collapses
again into a mass of sticks and condoms
and nothing and then as they relax you
can see the peristalsis kicking in and
then when they fist you can see that
that pops the robot back up again with
the strain of of the Fist so that seemed
really aesthetically compelling uh I
thought that was a really big success
but the big trick is that this effect
this armband and gesture can happen when
the person isn't in frame with the robot
so they can up to 30 ft away which is
very convenient when you're trying to
put together stage effects or special
effects or room scale effects or secret
theater effects uh you can have somebody
who this band is tuned to controlling
what's going on in the room kind of
secretly which is really helpful for
parties or uh interesting installations
in spaces where you want people to have
a consistent interaction but you don't
necessarily trust that the audience
themselves can fire that interaction
consistently uh this is a problem we see
a lot in video games and in other kinds
of public installations which is that
when people are trying to interact with
devices if we don't have the biggest
simplest button in the world on that
device they simply can't figure out how
it works so a lot of the kinetics just
don't quite have that uh nice response
to the human interest where if you have
a human controller who's doing something
that doesn't seem obvious it can really
add to the magic or the uh
implicit I don't know how to talk about
it the implicit performance of what's
happening so people can see this robot
but
they can't tell what is quite firing it
off and that sense that you don't quite
know what's causing it makes it more
interesting as you spend time with
it so uh a little bit more about future
work what would we do in future with
this project so I think that the biggest
thing is that we need to do a big write
up for the repository for the edited
scripts and code code and maybe make it
possible to work on a b rate that is not
9600 which uh might or might not be
programmed into the Mayo itself properly
uh now that we have this device and the
control system in place uh one of the
big weaknesses is just it takes almost a
full second for the code to run through
and to fire the new pose detection so we
could speed it up we might be able to
hook this to a larger scale pneumatics
project which would be interesting to do
as an installation in a physical space
that would be cool uh and the big thing
we found out is that the reason the my
armband isn't popular for this type of
work is because it's not very good for
this type of work so it's good for some
kinds of work but not really for this
because although I don't love buttons
for doing this type of installation
buttons are underrated because they are
very consistent if you toggle a switch
and that switch does something uh people
have a lot of confidence that the switch
is working where the armband takes away
a lot of that confidence and it could
add magic but it's just not smooth
enough to really have the the same
feeling of gesture control that people
are now used to from things like
capacitive touch screens or from actual
click buttons so thank you very much for
coming to our talk uh and we look
forward to seeing you in the jitsy chat
for it later on if you're interested in
more things that we're working on you
can find us in the chat and we will give
you some contact information uh we also
are both at the University of Maryland
College Park so you can find us there if
you are interested in talking to us more
thank you very much have a great
day so welcome back uh first of all a
bit of a dumb question but why condoms
seriously why
condoms well thank you so much for
asking uh it turns out that if you're
prototyping pneumatics uh you can do a
lot worse than a condom usually
pneumatics are prototyped with uh latex
balloons but latex balloons people
people don't get angry when they break
uh whereas people get very angry really
quickly if a condom breaks so condoms
are simply a lot tougher than latex
balloons which is useful if you're going
to inflate them and deflate them latex
balloons also need to be stretched
before they will inflate and they're not
intended to deflate and then inflate and
then deflate again whereas condoms are
intended to remain stretchy for the
entire duration of their life uh so they
have good shot control they have a much
tighter quality control uh they're about
the right size to build a small
prototype with and uh they're very
affordable if you have a university
health center nearby which would like
students to not get Knocked Up um so you
can go get them pretty easily at
like 8:30
p.m on the night is due what what what
kind of challenges do you do you
encounter when you use condoms to to
build something like this honestly not
many um so the trick is that if you have
ones that are pre-lubricated they are
slippery uh and that's annoying because
they make things greasy and greasy
things get dirty faster and so you want
to make sure that you get the
non-lubricated or less lubricated ones
which are usually done with cornstarch
and water instead of with oils uh which
is better if you're going to be working
with 3D printed parts or wood because
the cornstarch and water will dry really
beautifully and the condoms will still
remain not sticky they but they won't be
oily which you would
prefer so why why did you decide to use
a old device that relies on using
abandonware uh to to build this thing
isn't there anything else to to do the
job apart from
Mayo uh there are buttons and you the
sculpture piece we could control very
easily with any kind of in or out button
device but the Mayo was the piece that
made us interested in doing this work uh
it's got some nice things about it uh
one it's a Bluetooth device to as you
saw in our video it grants a letter of
performance when you're controlling the
robot uh so you can do things like
physical jokes you make a fist and the
robot gets hard you relax your hand and
the robot goes all to pieces and
collapses in a really beautiful way um
we also wanted to see if it was possible
because the myo armband has this weird
position in Prosthetics research where
it is the standard for or getting uh EMG
information out of uh people's
musculature that is perhaps no longer in
the state that one might prefer their
musculature to be in um so we wanted to
see what it would take to work with AO
if we didn't have the backing of uh meta
or control Labs or one of those things
what would it take to actually work with
one of these armbands and we thought
that this was a good project opportunity
to figure out not only how to work with
one but how to make one into a small
desk top sized package so the actual
robot is about this volume that I'm
holding in my hands it's about five
inches on a side or I guess that's 100
millimeters on a side maybe 120
um it's small it sits on a desk really
nicely so if we were able to get a Mayo
through a Raspberry Pi it means that we
could build quite a number of systems
and have a distributed collection of
robots around a space which is good for
interactions and for prop design which
could then be controlled by one person
prer in with with their gestures it it
makes for an interesting experience that
does indeed sound like a really cool
concept um so the the Mayo um it still
relies on on abandoned Windows software
do you intend on maybe working working
on that and uh reverse engineering
further than the communication
protocol we would like to uh it's a qu
it's an open question whether it's
worthwhile to do that or whe whether it
would be more worthwhile to use a
different EMG sensor that is already
open uh and which does not require that
situation so the two ways that could go
would be to build a better encapsulation
in a more Reliable Software environment
for more open EMG sensors as versus
reversing the myo itself which would
probably invol involve buying a lot of
mayo and then cracking them open and
then sticking them on a logic analyzer
um just because the myo does require
that you use a Windows
uh computer if you want to change the
default configuration for what are
called poses so the myo armband has six
pre-programmed poses uh including fist
fingers spread wave out wave in and
double tap I think there's one more that
I've forgotten um those are all
predefined on board on the band so if I
make a fist the Mayo can tell that I've
done something that is like a fist the
reason that we would would want to
change that is because the Maya was
trained on some beefy dudes from Ontario
and honestly if you're not a beefy dude
from Ontario it has a lot of trouble
telling what you're doing with your
hands um so my colleague is not a beefy
Ontario man uh and so we had some
problems when we were presenting where
like our nervous systems just run fast
and so the Mayo will record gestures in
a kind of unreliable way if we don't
custom calibrate it so it would be
advantageous to reverse it and that
might be fun um but it's for this
particular project we're mostly happy to
identify that that would be a necessary
step because that wasn't immediately
clear when we opened it
up one one last question
so you you currently currently using
just normal white condoms did you
consider using colored
ones we did we were W able to find ones
that weren't
lubricated like the lubricant grease is
actually a real problem because it means
that you can't quite snap things into
place but I think for future work it
would be fun to put together a larger
peristaltic collection of these and
maybe a a physically larger one as well
as more of them uh and to make them very
colorful indeed because people responded
so well to the condoms we really weren't
expecting that we were expecting
something else I think
I mean having having just like a a room
full full of them in like different
colors and different color combinations
and responding to to one person does
sound really
cool I just think it would be a fun art
project and sometimes what I want to do
is a fun art project so in terms of fun
art projects uh what's up next do you do
you have any plans for for any other
cool uh art projects Maybe involving
condoms maybe involving condoms now that
we've done this we haven't quite
discussed it yet but there are a couple
of paths we could go with it uh one of
them is we have actually built this
maette so we could pitch this to a
couple of the art parties that happened
internationally and be like let us build
giant human scale condoms with vacuum
cleaners behind them uh and that might
be an interesting idea uh I do like
building comple complex static
sculptures so we might do some more work
with that and with the 3D printing
a compilation of bamboo skewers sort of
pieces of it um but at the moment I
think what we are mostly focusing on is
both of us our PhD students and we are
almost done our coursework so I think we
might shove things for like three months
and then look into either reversing more
abandoned wear or coming up with uh new
3D printed shapes to force the
pneumatics through to do soft gripping
and to do other robotics any
are any any other Gadgets in your in
your drawer that you're really itching
to play around with but don't have the
time
to Yes uh so there's also something
called The Leap Motion which was the
precursor to valve's index system for
their VR controls and uh we think that
that might be very promising for more
pneumatic control work I really want to
shout out Tinker mind's programmable air
system here um he only made a hundred of
those he handbuilt every one of them but
uh the the programmable air pneumatic
system is just so easy to work with
relatively speaking it required one line
of code change to its main library to
work and so it really opened up the
possibility of making more of these
gadgets and so hooking a leap motion to
it might be interesting um because that
does hand tracking so you can mount it
to your forehead or you can mount it to
your your chest piece and you could do
some fun things with like LEDs or with
further pneumatic stuff on costuming and
so that's a thing that we're thinking of
so you mount it to to your forehead or
your chest and it has like a camera and
films your hands and then tries to
detect yeah it's an IR sensor yes it's
like a little miniature lar sensor so
the leap motion was a miniature lar
sensor that can detect once it's been
calibrated where your hand position is
so it works like a connect basically
like a a camera yeah but you could mount
it here or you could mount it here so
early versions of the Oculus Quest
system worked with the leap motions
technology and they would just glue one
of these things to the outside of a VR
headset so that the hands could be
detected and now of course um all that
technology is built into those headsets
like the cameras are built in so you can
get um proc detection but the leap
motion project still exists uh which
means that just the hand detection
without the VR system is is probably
possible which I think is interesting I
have some colleagues working with lar as
well but I don't because lar is so
useful I don't find it as
interesting so for back to the Mayo um
people are asking me where you've played
around with the with the calibration
process like what does it include how
much work is it is it even worth it to
try and calibrate something or have you
not tried to do
that we did two or three different
custom calibrations which doesn't sound
like a lot but I think that if somebody
wants to hack on the Mayo I honestly
think that it is not it should not stop
you that it is supposed to be on a
Windows machine or that you don't have
Windows access um all of your work was
done in Python on the Raspberry Pi
directly from libraries that we found on
the internet that aren't maintained but
also do not have they have to be updated
we have that those updates and we have
to make the proper repository and
publish it but uh if you are competent
at reading python the updates are not a
huge time block they're difficult but
they're not possible I'm not even going
to say they're difficult it's more like
they're a pain in the ass pardon my
language realistic yeah um and so if you
get one of these devices I think and you
are comfortable with python and the
Raspberry Pi environment as long as you
don't lose the Bluetooth dongle this
thing wants to pair to which comes with
it you probably are fine to just use the
poses that are on board because a more
interesting thing is that the Mayo does
shoot off raw data for your muscles at
all times
so if you were interested in doing
custom calibration and you didn't want
to use the thalmic lab software it would
probably make sense to take the 20
minutes to two days to write the
calibration on yourself using the raw
inputs from the Mayo rather than
worrying about using the Windows device
simply because the calibration process
for thalmic labs is so weird already and
it's honestly just a timer that reads
raw data while you're doing a pose so
like you would hold your fist like this
and the myo spits a bunch of raw data
data back uh and then the software
averages that out so that it's like on
average you're probably doing a fist and
this electrical signal means that you're
doing a fist I don't think that it would
be a problem to write that the problem
is getting it to upload to the device
and so that piece I don't know how to do
but I also don't know if it's important
because once you've read that
information if you write the calibration
it could live on your laptop and take
the raw information read and then output
the pose from inside your laptop instead
of from inside the armband
so it's convenient that the Mayo has six
pre five or six pre-programmed
poses if I were to do this on my own
computer I would probably write the
calibration and keep it local so that I
could back it up to GitHub and know that
it was going to work because that same
raw data is very likely to be similar
across EMG sensors so then the work
wouldn't necessarily go to away if for
example your irritable 14-year-old
armband decided to stop charging one
day yeah that's a lot of talking you
just mentioned that it's important to
keep the dongle if I lose the dongle
does the device just refused to pair
with any other Bluetooth dongle or or
onboard
Bluetooth technically it shouldn't but
at the moment ours is
finicky so the Bluetooth don't Le is
preferred because we believe that it
uses private codes we're not 100% on
this but we're pretty sure it uses keyed
codes toar to its own dongle and so it
is a Bluetooth device it is
using a Bluetooth communication pattern
but as I'm sure everyone here knows
Bluetooth isn't really a great standard
because it's got like 17 to 20 different
implementations so we have not hunted
around to make sure that it could pair
directly to the raspberry
P but in theory it can just be paired to
the Raspberry Pi we didn't focus on that
this this year and so actually if we
were to come back that's a more likely
thing for us to work on than reversing
the hardware
itself you mentioned
that oh sorry for interrupting you I
interrupted you um you mentioned that
the Deo uh is also used in biotech can
you can you elaborate on that a bit have
you have you done research into that
no we just know this because you are
from a neuroscience background at renell
and you worked with this in their many
terrifying Labs um and
so we'd heard of it being used in labs
and there's footage out there of it
being used in Labs but neither of us
have worked in Labs where this arm band
is is being used we just know that it is
because there's recent footage of it
happening and we recognized the device
so I believe that that is a good reason
I mean I mean it does just spit out raw
muscle data like you can just read it
once it's paired as long as you don't
lose the
dongle it does just spit out raw muscle
data so and the muscle data is I mean in
as much as anything is accurate TM it is
accurate so my best answer is no
sorry um are there any op Source or open
Hardware Alternatives that you're aware
of or yeah there are a couple of them
out of Ukraine and they're available on
um one of A's uh purchasing sub forums
there are a couple of ones that are
available and they are really
interesting um of course Adafruit sells
sticky pads that you can attach to uh as
EMG sensors that feed through an open
board uh the reason we went for this one
was because it's such a nice package we
wanted to double check that the hardware
wasn't going to waste but I think that
there are other ways you could do this
and you could get the a similar magic
effect I don't like using EMG pads
they're
itchy yeah yeah
anywhere they Stucky it's
fine um I don't yeah but yes you could
find open answers I I'd imagine that and
EMG P also like leaves the both a
problem of cost and like viability cuz
you you can't wear the pad for too long
I'd imagine and reusing them seems
difficult or questionable at
best yeah so it's really
um the the thing that makes the
myofunctional and there is an open
project it costs about 50 bucks uh I I
saw it on hackaday the other day because
we it was proposed that we made would
maybe use that the other project um we
wanted to use this because we wanted to
see what the blockers were really it was
a
curiosity but the big thing the Mayo
offers is that it
has like I would have to look at a
picture of it but every one of those
blocks on the Mayo is itself an EMG
sensor so it just has has a lot of
sensors and they appear to have done the
work to make sure that each of those
sensors is reading data in a clear way
that outputs a number that is actually
reflective of what the muscle is doing
where the sensor packages we see online
that are the open sensor packages cost
less money because they only have one
EMG sensor in them and it's held on
place by an elastic band so the risk
there is that if it's placed differently
on your arm and it's not glued to your
muscle which is how the ones that you
buy that are peel and stick stickers
that have the wires on them um the risk
is that it'll move around on your arm
and it will take different readings for
each position on your arm that it is
where the Mayo appears to a of all it
holds itself in place like stink it's
really really really really good at that
um and like it doesn't shift or move
around but be of all all of those
sensors appear to work in concert to get
you the muscle data out and so that
piece I think would be expensive to
reproduce I don't believe I could do it
for less money than the cost of the
actual armband as it was produced so it
kind of fuses the data to and like to
get rid of that that rotational
variability yeah I think it just gives
you really good clean output data and if
the labs that I've seen it attached to
are like the media Labs weird fancy new
legs lab and so I feel like if people
who have the funding are using it that
it might be the thing to use but that's
just me being sneaky like I don't know
if that's a real thing maybe I'm wrong
but I think that that's I think that's
probably the actual advantage of using
this band is that they did the they did
the noise leveling
yeah
um I'm just going to check really
quickly whether we have any other
questions going
on um
uh um I can't see any right now but uh
thank you very much for your talk uh it
was uh amazing it was enjoyable
something something really cool uh thank
you for joining us
today so on this channel we will
continue with bringing the hack back
into the chaos by Daniel maslovski at
11:00 p.m. um you can as usual send us
requests questions or memes on Mom by
using the hash ch23 you can send us
questions in the IRC channel on ic.
hack.org with the name
sh23 um we have a YouTube and a Twitch
account uh at fire shs each which also
each have a chat that you can post your
questions into we will read and uh
respond to them um we have a social
viewing experience in the aquarium in
the jitsy uh the link to that can be
found in our info beer shortly um our
mainstreaming platform is streaming.
media.ccc.de uh we also have a real life
setup there so you can rewatch past
talks that you've missed as this one um
for everyone at 37c fre we're a bit hard
to find us the info desk if you need
help