the cheapest, easiest to build dream goggles EVER!

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.

:smile: 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 :happy:

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 :tongue:. 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 :smile:

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

Don’t want to go into USB, USB needs a lot of expensive equipment (Compared to the costs of the rest of this project). :smile:

MeusOpusMagnus

I looked into detecting heartbeats with LEDs. And the best I think would be one that clips to your ear. The electronics for it is simple. I’ve always wanted to try that anyway. I’ll post any results I get from experimenting.

is there a link to the schematics or did you find them somewhere else ?

and any ideas on how you want to record the measurments ? plugging it to the computer (serial, parallel, sound card, etc) and recording everything on the computer is an easy option (most of the time)… at least it’s the best i can think of (and as it’s been the case in the past i never really think about the REALLY SIMPLE stuff, it’s always the more complicated things that go through my head first)…

i think the best way to do it is build different devices that measure different things, and record as much data as possible… the find out which one is the most reliable, and use that as the REM detector.

Hey MeusOpusMagnus,

I have another idea that came to me last night, btw i nearly had a lucid dream using a similar technique to that april fools topic, and i also had a false awakening.

My idea is what if we can detect REM by placing some kind of sensor on the tongue while we sleep, doesn’t the tongue get more dry during REM?
I have even heard that it curls up to the back of your mouth in REM, i can’t remmeber where i read this as it was ages ago.

But i had this other idea, you know those people that can slide a condom through their tongue and then catch the other end on the indside and bring it out through the mouth, they sort of play with it for a moment for show. Well i had a method, get some sort of clip that can sit on the tongue without coming off during sleep and on the clip there will be wires going from the inside up through the nostril and the end of the wire will sit on LED’s in a sleep mask giving you the cues while in a dream.
So when your tongue curls back in REM it pulls on a lever which will make the LED’s flash and there you have REM detection.
I even believe this idea would mean less compnents in the sleep mask allowing you to sleep on your front, side and back without the mask coming off or failing to cue you in the dream.

Okay i thought i will post another idea, the similar technique to the april fools joke that i used last night, was that i tied a tie around my legs, instead of foil on the feet. It was difficult to fall asleep at first i think 3 hours went by with no sleep, but i think this is more because i have been messing up my sleep cycle lately by going to sleep in the hours of the morning like 5:30 and 6:30am. So i will try again tonight with the method, i should fall asleep quicker.

Now i thought i had sucess with it with nearly becoming Lucid, as i saw the signs of lucidity within the dream but did not get there, but i read the word LD in the dream and when i had the false awakening. The good thing about a tie straped around your legs is that even though i had leway to move my legs apart by about 6 inches. I was still able to bend my legs in a way which would help my feet come out of the strap without me needing to un-tie myself. Now i thought that i would end up in the morning without the tie around me, but i wasn’t. Infact what happend was i ended up in the morning on my back which is a good sign and when i had the false awakening i was also lying on my back in the dream. So this is a good sign for LD and OBE’s.

Annyway my idea is can we create a kind of elastic that we wrap around the leg, the elastic cannot stretch very much while we are drifting to sleep even if the legs move apart a bit. But when we drift to sleep and i think possibly our legs may move about a little beofore REM so i thought the elastic could be linked to LED’s that would send a signal on the moments before REM and then the device will wait beofre it signals by a few mins till your in REM, and then bingo you have REM detection.

Or even we could create something similar to this method that may work better, what do you think?

What about detecting REM through your breathing, i am sure that your breathing rate must decrease signifcantly during REM. We could have a simple device clipped onto the chest linked to an LED in a sleep mask.

https://www.web-ee.com/Schematics/HeMon/HeMon.htm

Don’t worry about the amount or circuitry there. Once you download the schematic (You need adobe acrobat) you can see that only half of it is for detecting heatbeats.

I’m not sure how to get it into a computer. There will be left over inputs on the paralell port. I think the simpliest way would be to poll it repeatedly.

To stop movement, a clip could me made to attach it to your ear.

click here merck.com/mmhe/print/sec06/ch081/ch081a.html

it will tell you a bit about breath rates and REM

yeah, i think i saw this one… you probably don’t have to put it in the computer though, if you only want REM detection and signaling, a PIC would do the job… if not, you’d need cables and stuff, which makes it harder to keep it steady on the ear (or wherever else you may choose to place it, i mean, you could probably use an arm band, or a glove, socks, whatever)…

i’ll get the sound one done as soon as i get some spare time, see what it can do (maybe buy that GSR2 and see how it works) and then i could jump on this as well.

honeyjigga - i suggested breath a little earlier on, you could probably figure out how to use that from one of those watches that measures breath with a strap… from there on it wouldn’t be too hard to get things going.

the tongue thing, i dunno, easy to swallow… and… wires coming out through your nostrils ? how would you get them there ? hehe

This might not be extremely effective but how about you use a press button ( a very soft one)

Have the the program start when the button is -released-… go to sleep holding the button… when you fall asleep, your hand relaxes and lets go of the button. It doesn’t detect REM, but at least it aligns the program timing with your sleep cycle. my pc used to just flash on a timer but i ended up getting no sleep because it takes me 1hr to fall asleep where as the human average is 7 minutes. (hence patterns outta whack)

:grin:

i like this a lot, it’s a great idea to somewhat align a low-tech device with the sleep patterns… unfortunately i haven’t done anything to my LD devices lately, so all of this is basically on hold for now.

no way! Who wants to hold a button untill you fall asleap?