Bob Stone / Mbed 2 deprecated BlinkTalk Featured

A portable, hands-free, zero-effort blink-controlled speech system, inspired by the voice system of Stephen Hawking. Uses mbed, Neurosky Mindwave Mobile headset, BlueSMiRF modem and Emic2 speech board.

Dependencies:   SPI_TFT TFT_fonts mbed

Ever since I got the Parallax / Grand Idea Studio Emic2 sound board I've been wanting to find some way to mimic the hands-free typing / speech system used by Stephen Hawking. And when I figured out how to get the Neurosky Mindwave Mobile headset to identify blinks, I realised I could use blinking as the single minimal-effort input into the system to control a keyboard menuing system.

The system sweeps through rows until I blink, then sweeps along the row to select a character or action with another blink. If I let it go past the end, it cancels and carries on sweeping rows. Since we're also getting eSense (attention/meditation) and brainwave data from the headset, I've included small barcharts at the top of the screen to show those - perhaps concentrating on typing will show up in the concentration levels.

See my other projects for more on how to setup the BlueSMiRF for auto-connecting to the NeuroSky headset.

Hardware:

• Neurosky Mindwave Mobile headset - sends serial data packets over BlueTooth
• BlueSMiRF Silver Mate - receives data over BlueTooth from headset and relays over serial to mbed
• Parallax / Grand Idea Studio Emic2 speech synthesis - speaks text sent over serial from the mbed
• MikroElektronika TFT Proto - 320x240 TFT display with HX8374 controller driven by SPI
• Sparkfun level shifter - translates Emic2 5V serial to 3.3V serial for mbed