the cheapest, easiest to build dream goggles EVER!

yeah, i guess you could build up current, even with a capacitor/transistor based circuit like the ones in solar engines… it’s worth a try, but i don’t think i’d appreciate small electric shocks when sleeping… there also might be potential health risks involved.

as for the brain side, i don’t know what to tell you… for the light machine you close your eyes and it looks the way it does when you’re lying on your back under a tree and the sun shines through the leaves and they move around… after a while you start seeing geometric shapes or patterns appear and after that i fall asleep. i haven’t tried higher frequencies yet, and i haven’t tried visualization sets either…

as for the dreams part, the only time i remember seeing the clue in a dream was a few nights ago when i had a dream about talking with my cousin over a webcam. at one point it all went red and the screen flickered… i didn’t think about the mask though so i didn’t become lucid… i guess it depends on what you’re dreaming about or how your subconscious interprets the signal.

This is very interesting. I would be interested in the serial port version if the LPT really is that incompatible with XP. If I were to create a boot disk, boot to MS-DOS, and run the QBasic program from there, would that fix the problem? I am a QB programmer myself, but as soon as I got XP, I figured QB might not have a practical application anymore. Well, I was wrong! I think I will build a pair of these and experiment with them myself.

yeah, i never tried them under win XP… the boot disk idea would probably work well… Win XP is a nasty little bugger.

These people have made a DLL though which you can access the parallel port in Windows XP using visual basic 6.

https://www.logix4u.net/inpout32.htm

I think it’s the same one I used in 98.

well, at this point in time the GSR development has reached a halt… the parts i got seem to be conflicting with eachother (for those who know, the LM741 gets burnt by the ADS, or at least that’s my conclusion) so i’ll have to wait till i can get some help from someone when it comes to the electonic parts.

All we’re trying to do is basically find a way to convert a relatively small current (from 0V to about 1V max) to digital, we just need to find a way to allow the computer to monitor this value in real time… which seems easy enough, but the I2C to LPT approach might be a little too complicated for our needs.

And the answer came from stealing other people’s ideas

The GSR2 comes with this software (well, if you buy the package) that allows you to connect the GSR to the computer and plot graphs and play games and what not…

The thing is, the GSR doesn’t have any analog to digital converters… what it uses is the sound

Basically, you just convert the voltage to sound which changes in frequency with the variations in voltage. You shove in a headphone jack and plug it in the computer through the line in jack. And there you have it. All the software has to do is measure the sound frequency in real time and plot points on a graph at every x seconds. To make the readings acurate in volts, we can just figure out what voltage corresponds to what frequency, figure out the proportions and just convert the Hz back into V on screen (when you plot the graphs).

I ordered two samples of the AD7740 which will (hopefully) work nice and easy (which they probably won’t, there’s no nice and easy but i’ll figure it out )

Good news though

It makes the ENTIRE device that much easier to build and that much cheaper. And we can still use the LPT for the light machine and the vibrating alarm and all the other cool stuff we wanted, we just don’t need to worry about having it also READ information from the device, which eliminates more than half the components i was using for I2C to LPT…

I’ll keep you updated.

i bought one and it is awesome feels great after use!! man make one or buy one cheap( try ebay )

i thought of something the other day,

I am not a technical guy with electronics experience so i am not going to do what i am about to say, but i am sure when MeusOpusMagnus is free again he could try this.

Okay this may or may not of been done before
but i thought it would be good to buy off ebay a used novadreamer or even buy a remdreamer from here www.remdreamer.com then take it apart and find the rem detector. Then try hooking up the rem detector to their own novadreamer idea in the making. If this is not possible then they could try finding the same rem detector from the used nova dreamer or rem dreamer and find it’s name or model number, then do a google search to find where you can buy it, then they could write to the company an email asking for a sample and when they recieve it then you could start work on the unit. Or i even thought can’t you take a novadreamer apart make a list of all the components you need to build the device, then post plans, and price cost to build it yourself. Then put the plans on the internet freely available, of course this way does violate copyright laws but so what, there just plans then anonymously upload the plans to the internet and then we can get started on building them and nobody would know. I take it this is what MeusOpusMagnus is doing with the gsr unit, as this is going to be freely available as well.

Well that’s my thought, i hope somebody could do it.

EDIT:
Got some stander printer cables. And I hooked up a couple LEDs to some of the wires and they don’t go off at any time. The LEDs are on all the time, and they don’t seem to blink.
Any ideas? thx

bump

i’ll get back to this tomorow, i’m in a bit of a hurry now.

nm, I have figgered this out. Thx
Few tips for people still thinking this is too hard.

For starters check this page to learn about LEDs, along with what side is the LEDs ground.

kpsec.freeuk.com/components/led.htm

second the “Circuit Diagram” shown(on hackcanada.com/homegrown/wetware/brainwave/) must be followed 100% you can’t just hook up random wires and still have it turn on and off. So you need to know the number of the wire. As for readding it, at first I was like WTF but an easy way to look at it is that the trangle is the +plus/power and the other side of the trangle is the ground.

If your using the printer cable you have one major ground, unlike the parallel ports 18-25, and of course the ground is the one without the plastic protection on it.

And the way to label the wires on the printer cable is to use a battery and put the ground on the -(negative) and then put one of the color coverd wires on the + (positive) on the battery. Then using the LED drag it along the other side of the cable(the one that is going to connet to the computer when your finished). You only need to touch one pin at a time with the anode side of the LED, the cathode side can just touch the metal side of the connecter. If your saying WTF to the last sentence then read the LED page I posted above. When the LED turns on you have found your number, the number should be printed on the inside of the connecter. Might need a light to read it.

yep, that’s how you do it.

if you have a multimiter it’s a lot easier, you check for conductivity, but i guess if you have a multimiter it’s because you know how to do this kinda stuff anyway.

so the battery trick is the way to go… make sure the way you connect the leds to the goggles is the same as the diagram (in terms of number, which number goes up, left, right, which eye, etc)… else the preset patterns will become kind of random. all you need to remember is the number of the pins though, because with lpt the functions are something like:

turn on pin 2
wait whatever time
turn off pin 2

whatever’s connected to pin 2 doesn’t really matter, the port will output voltage. of course, there’s other pins, but the first 8 (since 8 leds) work this way.

so yeah, let me know how it goes and if they work for you

as for the rem-dreamer idea (the gsr unit is on hold right now, i was terribly busy with school, but i’ll get back to it soon, we were making some progress) it’s a good idea and someone could obviously reverse engineer the mask… the problem is the microcontroller software (because the mask is operated by one) which i really don’t know much about… so someone else would have to figure that out… AND, the second problem, is the price… if i could have bought one, i would have, and i wouldn’t bother trying to make clones/variations of the device. Sure, once I’d have it i couldn’t resist figuring out which parts it uses, how they work, etc, i always wondered that. But yeah, i can’t afford buying one and not even knowing if it will work properly.

well MeusOpusMagnus you seem to be the electronics wiz kid,
so i say to everyone reading this thread ‘let’s all donate to you MeusOpusMagnus’ say 5 dollars each. That way 30 people donate and you have your rem dreamer. I think this way does work the best, it means you can find out what rem detector there using and you could buy it from a supplier and start making clones or use it in your own system.

I will donate to you 10 dollars

Please guys reply with at least 5 dollars or more, anyway what is 5 dollars. Come on it’s for a great lucid dreaming project. The sooner you donate or the more you donate then the easier it will be for this project to start.

Just reply with your donation limit, then MeusOpusMagnus can setup a paypal account unless he already has one, and then it simply donation time.

honeyjigga - i appreciate your enthusiasm, but i don’t think it’s a good idea hehe. Not that i wouldn’t mind getting donations for an REM dreamer but because, eventually, things may go awfully wrong and i don’t want such a big responsibility. As i said, i’m not very good in electronics (i’m in fine arts!) so this is problem #1… if i can’t figure out the machine i’d basically rip off an REM Dreamer from all these people who were kind enough and hopeful to participate…
So if someone WERE to do it, it shouldn’t be me.

BUT… you don’t really NEED the REM dreamer per-se. You need high quality pictures of the PCB, front and back. This way you can figure out most of the components (at least the crucial ones) and the rest you fill in. Then you can figure out if the difference between the REM Dreamer and say the Kvasar is big at all, of if it actually uses the same design.

Once you got the main components down, you figure out how they work, what voltage they need, etc, and you re-build it. Then someone has to do the chip programming and that’s about it… No one spends their money and if the project doesn’t pull through, no one feels cheated.

So yeah, if anyone is willing to take good pictures of their masks (as many as possible) that would be a good deal. The pictures have to bee large enough for us to see the writing on the components and the connections on the back of the pcb.

I have been stupid all this time, i could not believe it what i figured out yesterday. We can detect REM by measuring our own heartbeat, now that’s easy. But firsty you got to know that our heartbeats 50,000 times a day. So i would expect the rate to drop or it may increase quite significately in dreaming. So the easy part is all we need is one of those heartrate belts and even one of those heartrate watches. I remember my brother having one as he would use when he was working out on the rowing machine. Now i thought if you had a belt over your heart and then was able to hook the belt up in a way to a sleep mask with flashing lights then it could send light cues when you enter REM. This would be easy to build and i think very quick to do.
Also wearing a belt or even some sort of device which has similar components that are in the belt but just over the area of the skin above the heart, which could stick on using some kind of cream may work better as it would not fall off as you roll around in bed as you dream at night.

What do you think?

Personally, I think the REM detector sounds more feasible, but who knows. You should experiment with the belt and let us know if your heartrate actually does change that significantly while in REM. I don’t know, if there is a change, if it would be consistent with every REM period or for every person…

I was thinking the same thing about heart rates yesterday when I read MeusOpusMagnus’ post. He must have encoded a subliminal message . It may be hard for some people to get a heartrate detector and it would be harder to integrate with everything else.

But if you could measure your average heart rate and the standard deviation, that would be great. I’m going to look it up now I think

you can build a VERY SIMPLE heart rate monitor by using a photodiode and a led… basically, when your heart beats, blood under your skin increases and decreases… these cause the skin to be more or less opaque. This is very very cheap to do but means the device has to mentain a constant distance from the skin, which can be hard when you’re sleeping (then again, you can encase it in a small box that pushes against the sking)…

the second way is by measuring electricity across the skin, electrodermal style (like the GSR)… there are long term fluctuations (during a week for instance, your level of activity across the skin can change), then there are some other large fluctuations, which are linked to stress levels, sleep, etc and smaller fluctuations, which happen cause of the heart beat… that’s how most of those watches work.

now, i did a research on heart beat and while it’s true that it changes during REM the change is not that significant, it’s (from what i read) about 5 to 10 beats per minute differece, which may not be a strong enough cue for an rem detector…

but since we’re talking straps, BREATH changes SIGNIFICANTLY during sleep. if one could measure breath frequency and amplitude (both of which change) you’d have a very very good means of detecting REM which could be somewhat cheap… i just don’t know how those breath straps work though.

and, the second thing we though would be a good way of detecting REM was of course GSR (electrodermal that i mentioned before), which would be transferred now to sound.

the idea is instead of complicating ourselves with analog to digital devices, we can just use the same thing the GSR 2 has, a line out. You plug it in the computer and you basically find the frequency of the sound (which would be directly proportional to the electrodermal responses) and there you have it… then you use a cheap pair of glasses like this to signal rem.

the advantage is the cost, and the fact you could program the glasses to put you to sleep and signal when necessary, like the Dream Maker PRO and VERY EXPENSIVE… not to mention additions of sound, biofeedback, etc… it would mostly be software driven.

Hey MeusOpusMagnus,

I posted a while back this site www.mindfield.de if you go there you will se on the left a mind machine tab. Click on it and you will be presented with 3 different light and sound machines. Scroll to the bottom of the page and now you see the pro version which is a rip off at 123 US Dollars. Anyway the pro version uses USB. Have you thought about using USB in your device? wouldn’t it be easier than a printer port cable? As USB is plug and play, you just configure the drivers and your all set. I was thinking is it possible to use your current drivers the ones that you made for the light and sound machine that you built from those plans you found on the net, could we use your drivers to operate these mindfield glasses?

Anyway also if we create a device with a heartrate detector for REM detection. Is this 100 percent safe to have it on the heart while you sleep?, as i thought electricity running through the night may be dangerous on the heart.

Also in your device would you have both GSR and REM detectors linked up to a sound cue or light cue via LED’S? i think that would work better as if the GSR detection does not work so great then the REM detection may work better, we already know REM detectors work, as the response form nova dreamer customers on here.

I know that you also post on the dreamviews forum, i go there a lot to see whats happening on your device. I was thinking have you posted your ideas anywhere else on the internet. Also i thought the website in which you found the plans for making the light and sound machine that you have made, wouldn’t it be a good idea to post your idea to the creator of those plans and see if he can come up with any ideas that could help with development, as there are some even more highly technical electricians out there aswell, and i know your busy with school so they could help out, i really can see this project as being a hit.

Anyway those were my thoughts and ideas
I look forward to your repsonse